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Comment by emsy | Hacker News Reader

It’s true for Germany. There recently was a case of a podcaster whose acquaintances were tapped and was apprehended while walking with his 1yo for posting memes. An AfD politician was fined 6000€ for posting crime statistics. A man had his house searched for sharing a meme of calling a politician something along the lines of „idiot“. There’s also the 60 minutes interview where prosecutors brag about confiscating devices for posting memes.

From what I hear from acquaintances and social media, the UK is even worse.

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> An AfD politician was fined 6000€ for posting crime statistics.

No, she was not fined for posting crime statistics [0].

> Kaiser published a tile on her social media accounts with the text "Afghanistan refugees; Hamburg SPD mayor for 'unbureaucratic' admission; Welcome culture for gang rapes?"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie-Th%C3%A9r%C3%A8se_Kaiser...

> [media posts] reinforce the "negatively abbreviated representation" and fuels an atmosphere of fear and rejection. In explaining the verdict, Halbfas also made it clear: "Those who attack human dignity cannot invoke freedom of speech."

She was found guilty of reinforcing negative stereotypes and by doing so she "violated the human dignity of a distinct group of Afghan refugees".

Where is the line between having anti-immigration politics and harming refugees? If free speech means anything it should at least protect political opinions, and that includes politics many of us find distasteful or racist.

Dragging somebody through the courts and fining them heavily for a simple social media post is pretty extreme. If her post was deserving of a €6000 fine what kind of commentary will get you fined €1000? Which opinions will get you a visit from the cops and a stern talking to? Who decides where the line is between acceptable political opinion and unacceptable hate speech? How are regular people supposed to tell the difference? Or are regular people just expected not talk about controversial subjects at all if they can't afford to pay a €6000 fine?

> Dragging somebody through the courts and fining them heavily for a simple social media post is pretty extreme

Simple cute social media post where she equates afghan refugees to gang rapists.

> Which opinions will get you a visit from the cops and a stern talking to?

Racist ones that leads to violence. Argument started from "going to jail in europe for posting memes" to "posting statistics" to blatant racist xenophobic stereotyping punished via financial penalty. Free speech crusade came all the way to this goal post.

Free speech must include unpopular and even grotesque speech. That's not moving the goal post that's the entire point.

It's no coincidence that the laws used to punish people for speech are exceptionally vague. There is no clearly defined benchmark of harm. In fact harm does not need to be demonstrated at all. Simply asserting without evidence that a blog "leads to violence" is sufficient for those who don't believe in free speech.

Calling such posts grotesque and unpopular is quite euphemistic. They are aggressive and dehumanizing. And the determination on what should or shouldn't be protected as free speech doesn't happen in a vacuum: these attacks were targetted at a minority which is already regularly assaulted violently just for going about their day, because of violence-inciting shitposts like that. Of course you can't usually prove that post A led to violent crime B, but simply pretending like telling people over and over again that some group is criminal scum isn't going to lead to more violence against them also can't be the solution.

I also think that such laws almost have to be kind of vague by necessity, because the agitators will just try and be clever for plausible deniability. The idea is that a judge will rule on it, and the accused gets legal representation to defend their case. Of course you can always find some case where you may think the ruling was too harsh (or too lenient), but overall, the system seems to work pretty well. You really have to dig deep to find one or two iffy cases.

"the Rotenburg District Court concluded that Kaiser had taken the quoted information out of context in the post text and knowingly risked that the tile would be perceived as incitement to hatred by an objective observer. Additionally, the rhetorical question violated the human dignity of a distinct group of Afghan refugees."

- Wikipedia

You're ok with that?!

I am. She got a court date and she got legal representation. She got the chance to convince the court that she did not intend his post as an incitement to violence, and she failed to do so.

I strongly believe that inciting hate and violence against others should have consequences. And I'm glad to live in a place where society decided that there is no place for such things. We're not talking about political opinions here, but hate speech with clear intention to cause harm.

Happy to fix that for you. You can no more go to jail for "posting a meme" than you can do for "speaking some words".

Context and content is important. There are limits to allowable speech (yes, even in the USA) and if you transgress that you can be breaking the law.

ok but I was asking for some reliable sources, not a paragraph of anecdotes. I could go google each one myself, but I don't even want to imagine in what kind of hellhole websites I will end up in if I do that.

I'm not the parent, but one reference they made but didn't link was this 60 Minutes clip "Policing the internet in Germany, where hate speech, insults are a crime". It was a bit of a meme in Germany.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bMzFDpfDwc

Still, the author of the original article has some pretty polarising and crude views, and I think it's valuable to keep that context in mind. The key is not to be lazy and just dismiss everything that doesn't come from the smoothest PR media personality.

For me, it felt like reading a frustrated author arguing against over-reliance on the service sector as an economy, given the dependencies it creates. There is certainly nationalism, realism/geopolitical views and a somewhat raw criticism of the current monetary system in the mix. The author sprinkles a lot of cultural references all over it and concludes with a tongue-in-cheek hint at an accelerationist strategy.

.. based on that random blogpost I probably still wouldn't buy any gold just yet.

German police raid homes of activists for making anti-Israel social media posts https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/german-police-raid-prop...

(Trump also just tweeted that activists will be imprisoned)

Your link doesn’t state that.

https://hyphenonline.com/2024/10/04/ava-moayeri-germany-pro-...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/police-berlin-raid-flats-pro-1333...

https://www.dw.com/en/german-police-raid-homes-of-pro-palest...

In the subtitle of the DW link: "One of the suspects was accused of a violent attack on a state politician."

Seems like this was not just about posting memes.

The articles are about a handful of cases. You ignored all the others which were non violent and picked the irrelevant detail to share deceitfully as representative of the rest.

That seems to be a common tactic for authoritarians trying to control others by taking away their speech rights.

Notice also that the poster was only accused, not found liable or convicted. That means almost nothing - you can accuse anyone of anything.

Notice also the guilt by association, where the possibility of the poster committing violence (which isn't impossible) is used to try to invalidate their right to speech.

I find it interesting that the first replies i got were about racists, nazi sympathizers, afd people and so on (who it turns out never got jailed, but fined, and not for "posting a meme" but for going against well known laws against inciting violence).

Yours is the only reply (yet) that talks about Palestine, that I find much more interesting in this context. It should be noted that pro palestinian protesters have been arrested in the US too, so I don't know if it's really a good point when comparing "freedom of speech" between the US and Germany.

Unless what you meant was "freedom of speech" is an illusions and Americans are deluded into thinking they have more of it.

Both US and Germany are rapidly criminalizing vocal support for Palestine and criticism of Israel. Canada is, too - they've escalated a protest crime (painting a message against IDF recruitment on private property... the owner of a large bookstore chain here pays Canadians to go join the IDF) into a hate crime by calling it antisemitic so they can prosecute it more harshly.

The only people who are in jail for political reasons in the UK are fossil fuel company protestors, who were jailed for planning a protest during a Zoom meeting. Others have been jailed for relatively minor but high profile actions, such as throwing paint at paintings (protected behind glass).

People have been jailed for racist rioting and planning racist riots, but not many people in the UK see that as a bad thing.

The climate change prisoners are getting a lot more support.

The US imprisons countless black people every year for the flimsiest reasons with questionable due process, in for-profit prisons, some of which have been caught operating with kickbacks for judges.

Also, Aaron Swartz.

And multiple arrests of journalists.

https://pressfreedomtracker.us/blog/journalists-arrested-in-...

The idea that the US is some kind of utopian beacon of free speech while the rest of the world is authoritarian and repressive is utter nonsense.

> People have been jailed for racist rioting and planning racist riots

This is a factually false. The recent UK riots were largely about protesting violence (stabbings, killings, rape (which increased by a factor of 4.3 over 13 years, closely correlated to migration) and unchecked immigration (which is unpopular and opposed by a large fraction of the population, from someone who lived there).

These are, factually, not issues of racism - they are humans rights (in the case of the violence) and extremely reasonable political positions (in the case of cutting down immigration), and it's intentionally and maliciously deceptive to claim that they're "racism".

Yes, it's likely that some number of people at the riots were there because they were racist. No, the majority of the protestors were not there for that reason, and claiming that that small fraction makes the riots "racist" (not that that's even a coherent statement to make in the first place) is a lie.

Additionally, it's also a lie to claim that only people participating in or planning the riots were jailed - "A judge has warned that anybody present at a riot will be remanded in custody, even if they were only a “curious observer”"[1], which was actually implemented, with documented video evidence of people getting arrested for merely filming the protests and police, with no participation[2].

It's deeply evil to defend the UK government's behavior here.

> The idea that the US

This is the tu quoque fallacy, in addition to being irrelevant - the topic is the UK and EU on free speech, not the UK.

This whole comment is just a tangle of lies, fallacies, and emotional manipulation.

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/09/judge-refuses-ba...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0X4uPjcEsE

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