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Comment by AlanYx | Hacker News Reader

It was Germany that really got the ball rolling on this, with its Network Enforcement Act (commonly called "NetzDG"). NetzDG is being used as a model for policymakers in the UK, Canada and Australia. This is pretty astonishing to me, given that there are serious, systemic problems with how NetzDG operates, some which are clearly evident from its mandatory annual reporting.

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Of course, also Germany. I was gonna ask if NetzDG was the means through which you could have been arrested for speech(i.e opinions for example, not "spreading fake news") on social media. After a quick search I've seen that it passed after 2017, which is chronologically after the cases I remember that happened in UK&DE. In any case, not exactly an ideal law for western values.

They are slowly catching up with Putin's Russia. He started jailing dissidents years ago on this exact pretext. His government pioneered the corresponding legalese (known as rule 282) as early as 2002. And of course initially it was applied to literal Nazis only.

It boggle my mind to think that former democracies so want to become second-rate authoritarian regimes. The country that started it all with Magna Carta 800 years ago just abandons hard-won freedoms without a major war or famine powerful enough to distract the populace.

I strongly agree.

It's also worth mentioning that rule 282 is only a small part of the Russian media control regime at this point; it's expanded dramatically in recent years, particularly post-2017. One could write a whole book about the current constellation of Russian media control legislation.

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