Do you not think there might be a difference between expressing an opinion and inciting people to violence?
So I disagree. It isn’t right to form a gang on the street and attack someone, and it isn’t right to form a gang on the internet and incite violence, or strongly disrespect a person or people. Even if you take at first step the difference between actual physical harm VS a ‘bytes on the internet’ approach, the mental health harms to the persecuted group are real and have lead to suicides in individual examples, or actual violence as demonstrated in the article.
Speaking from a medical perspective, I don’t draw a difference between physical and mental harm (precious snowflaking aside).
Sure it’s a grey area but carte Blanche in this domain is damaging.
If Joe Blow tweets "kill the kikes", nobody cares.
If someone with millions of devout followers says the same, there will eventually be blood.
Or in your case, if a person with influence tells their fan club to harass someone, the victim may suffer actual mental health issues when enough of them act on it.
The whole idea seems to be: murder and genocide are so bad, that any legislation that either statistically reduces them, or even just seems like it might do, is worth it. I'll grant that I can see how a reasonable person might think this. Then it's a question of values. Remember that one of our great American heroes literally said, "Give me liberty, or give me death," immediately after doubting that life is dear enough, or peace sweet enough, in themselves.
As far as that goes, I'm old and it saddens me that we keep going from one oppressive cultural regime to another. When I was young, there were also things you couldn't say, they were just different things. But I will say that this is the first time in my life that freedom of speech itself has been explicitly challenged by a significant bloc in the US.
You're misunderstanding what the idea is. The idea is to show german children:
That person has that opinion and they may think it, but the opinion is wrong. We had a huge big argument over it, some people call it WW2, and the result was: Their opinion is wrong. So we decided to let that be the last argument about it and not let them start another argument, because the question has been answered at length.
I was referencing one of the original comments made by a German far-right politician on Facebook that started the debate about the responsibility of platforms like Facebook in moderating hate speech which in turn resulted in the law the article describes:
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...
It's not a slippery slope in this case. I admit it's a bit unfair to reduce psyc's argument to this but the language the law covers is entirely in the category of "people openly demanding that certain other people be killed or subjected to violence". Facebook dragged their feet to moderate comments like these and the law is a response to create a legal tool to force companies like Facebook to moderate hate speech or face serious fines.
I guess I can see why Americans would object to it: political hate speech is weaponised speech and Americans are ridiculously obsessed with being allowed to own weapons. It's that absurd idea that when the time comes and the others have infiltrated the government, the common man will take to arms and overthrow it (because presumably the military will defect and not just kill everyone).
It's true, I'm advocating some limits on people's freedoms. I don't think people should enjoy the freedom to launch campaigns of genocide, for example.