There are a couple of massive caveats to this. Starting with that Germany example: there's a common pattern of saying "all Germany bans is Nazi propaganda, sur

There are a couple of massive caveats to this. Starting with that Germany example: there's a common pattern of saying "all Germany bans is Nazi propaganda, surely you don't object to that?", but it's not actually true. Germany bans 'insult', a category which produces upwards of 20,000 convictions per year. Disparaging the symbols of the state is prohibited, and a lèse-majesté law was present and occasionally enforced until January 2018. Distributing pornographic writing remains restricted, as does insulting a faith in a manner that could disturb the peace - both classes of law which are infamous around the world for enabling biased prosecutions along religious lines. And when it comes to the mechanisms of speech, Germany set the precedent on the infamously terrible 'link tax' rule being floated for the EU as a whole. On to the question of the US First Amendment: 1A critics often have a blindspot about how the presence of extremely strong free speech protections anywhere helps people everywhere in the digital era. The UK, for example, has ludicrous internet censorship standards ranging from banning hosting for large classes of content to ISP-level site blocking. (And it turns out those powers have been consistently used to enable copyright abusers and restrict LGBT content, exactly like free speech advocates predicted.) But the situation in the UK isn't terribly bad - because offending content is hosted under US laws and served back to the UK! We see this pattern all over. Turkish dissidents graffiti the IPs of US-hosted content to bypass DNS blocks. Chinese firewall-bypassers end up on Taiwanese and US sites for regime-critical news. Bangladeshi student protestors share videos on Firechat that eventually end up on Reddit under 1A protections. The 'right to be forgotten' itself acts as a bar to cursory investigation instead of full information hiding because US-based search retains removed results. If free speech absolutism means saying "German and Chinese speech laws are equally unacceptable", then sure, that's absurd. But jumping from "Germany isn't totalitarian" to "1A stringency is needless because Germany's fine" is the same sort of mistake in the opposite direction.