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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

Additional context:

> NetzDG (2017/2018): Germany passed the NetzDG legislation in June 2017, which officially took effect in January 2018. Designed to combat hate speech online, it mandated that major social media platforms remove "illegal content"—including defamation and insults—within strict timeframes or face heavy fines.

> Strict Liability Precedent: Even before NetzDG, German courts have traditionally set a low threshold for companies to challenge reviews. If a business simply claims a reviewer has no record of a transaction, platforms will often temporarily remove the review and force the user to provide proof of their visit.

> Fully 99.97% of Google Maps reviews taken down for “defamation” across the entire 27-country European Union are for businesses based in Germany, official European data shows.

I'll take unintended consequences for $500

https://www.fastcompany.com/91420303/google-review-germany-t...

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> Designed to combat hate speech online, it mandated that major social media platforms remove "illegal content"—including defamation and insults—within strict timeframes or face heavy fines.

To clarify, this is not content that a court or even just the police has determined to be illegal - this is merely content alleged to be illegal by any random complainant. So a company can remove content and suffer no consequences, even if it was perfectly legal, or it can risk an up to 5M Euro fine if it keeps the content up but gets it wrong.

Every free speech and human rights organization under the sun warned them this would result in unchecked privatized censorship, yet they did it anyway. The result was not unintended, but 100% deliberate, and the politicians that voted for it are not stupid, but simply malicious.

Germany manages free speech and democracy as well as it does producing software. I really want to know where the cultural difference originates from. Why are CAD drawing engineers respected while programmers are walked allover. Why is eastern europe exempted from this cultural curse?

Culturally east europe is hugely different from west europe. No expert, but you can certainly hold a lot to it from the soviet bloc and how industrialisation happened in a given country.

> Germany manages free speech and democracy as well as it does producing software.

That sentence works suprising well for the US too: enshitified and completely controlled by a cartel of trillion dollar corporations.

What are you talking about?

Lets take the average machine building company, i promise you the engineers drawing the machines sit in quiet climatized rooms. Meanwhile the "software" sits in bustling cattlefarm like largescale offices. There is no money for startups but there is money for playing startup and the various wirecards. Wha are theset the fuck is wrong with that culture, that it stopped innovating and tried to life from rent-seeking on ic vehicles? A d when pressed for answers- all it has is these lame passive aggressive rhetorical questions?

Beside other reasons, one cultural difference is that Germans tend to be more risk adverse. They like just working for big companies for many years and decades, having 30-40 vacation days (aka "PTO"), good to high living standard and getting relatively much retirement money afterwards.

Generally, because Employees are protected to some degree, when you start a startup you introduce a lot uncertainty into your life.

> There is no money for startups but there is money for playing startup and the various wirecards.

Not sure what you mean by "various wirecards", you mean it's always fintech?Oftentimes it's US VC, because there's just not that much VC flying around in Europe. So I guess only well connected and few high profile startups get to receive big money - see Helsing AI as latest example.

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