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One calls it censorship, someone else calls it protection of democracy and freedoms, because freedom of speech is not absolute and not of higher priority than o

One calls it censorship, someone else calls it protection of democracy and freedoms, because freedom of speech is not absolute and not of higher priority than other human rights. Human rights are always in conflict with each other: today USA is deciding to violate right of property for Russian oligarchs because rights of Ukrainian citizen are violated. Right for free movement was restricted during Covid pandemic for many people and often restricted as a punishment for crimes. How freedom of speech is so different that people cry about it without considering the context? Why people think that Germany is a model state for censorship, when there are states which censor media for real, before publication, do it for longer, more efficiently and to suppress opposition? Just for reference, Germany has the same high HFI index as United States: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freedom-index-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freedom-i...

sieabahlpark 5y ago
Any censorship is disgusting and should be rejected. Regardless of context. Disagreement with that means you're a threat to democracy, period.
croes 5y ago
So because others are worse Germany's laws are good? I don't know but laws that allow someone to be locked up indefinitely without conviction don't sound like freedom to me.
- ivan_gammel 5y ago
  What laws are you referring to specifically?
  - croes 5y ago
    Bavarian Police Act
swayvil 5y ago
Democracy is a conversation where we, as a society, craft policy. What makes it a democracy is that all members of society participate in that conversation. Freely. Anything less is mere tyranny. But if we need a way to manage spam, lies and the other poisonous forms of conversation, then empower the individual to handle that. Because we do not trust you.
- ivan_gammel 5y ago
  >What makes it a democracy is that all members of society participate in that conversation. Freely. Anything less is mere tyranny. I guess the keyword there is „that“, right? Freedom of speech should not be restricted if it helps to support the democracy, but OTHER conversations are different matter. As I said, freedom of speech is not absolute and is checked by other freedoms and rights.
  - swayvil 5y ago
    To suggest that any conversation is more deserving of a guarantee of sincerity than any other seems bad. Should we assume that there is an invisible man between us, transforming our words? That seems really bad to me.
  - flenserboy 5y ago
    Freedom of speech is foundational for other rights. Take that away, and the other rights might as well not exist.
    - ivan_gammel 5y ago
      This is not correct. Nobody takes it away. It is limited by other rights through the laws that explain when and how the rights should be balanced.
      - flenserboy 5y ago
        Talk of "balances between rights" always ends up in restrictions on liberty. Communitarianism sounds possibly workable until you start to realize that those making the laws you mention (if you're lucky to get them instead of vague guidelines, and then Katie bar the door) and those adjudicating the laws will only decide on the side of whatever benefits them and their cronies. That's taking away freedom of speech, that's taking away all sorts of rights. Liberty is too precious to leave it to politicians and bureaucrats.
car_analogy 5y ago
You are defending generic restrictions on speech, but the NetzDG makes very specific restrictions - such as prohibitive (up to €50 million) fines if something claimed to be illegal (by a mere complainant, not a court order) is not taken down within 7 days, and within 24 hours if it is "clearly illegal", resulting in severe chilling effects. Try to defended those instead. (Yes, no fine is levied if the content is not taken down, and turns out to not be illegal. What sane company will take such a risk?)
- ivan_gammel 5y ago
  Do you have a precedent where this resulted in unlawful restriction of speech or it’s just a generic speculation? I had a look once at the form in one of Meta services to report hate speech: it does require some effort to fill the form and it does require the issue to be reported to police. If you don’t want to report the case to authorities, the platform will not take down the content. I do not see how this could result in a real censorship in a state with the rule of law.
  - nfreising 5y ago
    I have looked at the NetzDG reporting on YouTube and Twitter and while both of them require you to cite a specific law the content is in violation of, they both do not require any report to authorities. The NetzDG doesn't require involvement of authorities, it was especially designed with the goal of moving the work from the state to private companies.
  - usrusr 5y ago
    Laws that are bad because of abuseability didn't somehow transcend from good to bad the first time they were abused, they would have already been bad before that event. But you still have a point in so far as that you can't look at a law ignoring the legal conventions and processes of the environment where "the code is run", something that would be perfectly fine in one environment could be terrible in another.
  - car_analogy 5y ago
    A few examples (though the reporting could be clearer): https://www.techdirt.com/2018/01/12/second-time-week-german-hate-speech-laws-results-deletion-innocent-speech/ https://www.techdirt.com/2018/01/12/second-time-week-german-... https://www.dw.com/en/facebook-slammed-for-censoring-german-street-artist/a-42155218 https://www.dw.com/en/facebook-slammed-for-censoring-german-... Fortunately for the defenders of that law, the notoriously opaque censorship of social media companies helps hide what is going on, so few examples surface. I could not find anything as convenient as a list of (wrongfully or not) censored content by this law. Often the censored party is not even told that the NetzDG was involved. Silence on this issue should not be confused with a lack of problems, however. For example, in Germany: “it can be a criminal offense in Germany to call another person a ‘jerk,’ or even to use the informal du, or ‘thou,’” to communicate a lack of respect for the recipient. German courts have penalized other similar “derogatory epithets,” including “asshole,” “bastard,” “old goat, “fathead,” “dope,” and “whore.” [..] German courts heard 26,757 criminal insult cases that year, leading to 21,454 convictions and 20,390 fines. - https://law.yale.edu/mfia/case-disclosed/germanys-netzdg-and-threat-online-free-speech https://law.yale.edu/mfia/case-disclosed/germanys-netzdg-and... To me this looks like a severe overreach of speech restrictions, even if one doesn't idealize the US 1st amendment, and accepts the need for some government censorship. Yet I've only learned about it just now, from a very obscure post.
cato_the_elder 5y ago
Those indices are ridiculous, and at best merely reflective of the values of the people who compose them.
impossiblefork 5y ago
Without freedom of speech you don't have democracy, or true freedom of association, etc. It's a critical foundational right on which other human rights are founded.
- LeanderK 5y ago
  this is not how the german state (or german democracy?) is built. Freedom of speech has bounds here and this can be defended.
- ivan_gammel 5y ago
  It is not foundational, it is one of the many rights that our society recognizes. In Universal Declaration of Human Rights it’s Article 19, coming after 18 other articles. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma... In German constitution it is Article 5 and it is explicitly limited, considering the importance of the balance. https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/German_Federal_Republic_2012.pdf#page7 https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/German_Federa...
  - impossiblefork 5y ago
    It is absolutely foundational. You're talking about laws, but free speech isn't about laws, it's a notion of moral philosophy. The sense in which it is foundational is as follows: you cannot have democracy without freedom of speech, because without it there is no free formation of opinions. You can't freedom of association or freedom of assembly without freedom of speech. These latter are interconnected, because an aspect of freedom of assembly is to assemble to hold, for example, political meetings.
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
Speech can't hurt you. Speech by itself doesn't violate any of your rights.
- bromuro 5y ago
  Oh no, verbal abuses do hurt and in very subtle ways.
- ivan_gammel 5y ago
  Private property cannot hurt you, yet property ownership is restricted (e.g. you have to pay taxes). Restrictions often exist not to prevent immediate harm, but to make society functional and enable implementation of other rights. Restriction of free speech can be necessary if it is used to incite violence, thus triggering violation of other rights.
vorpalhex 5y ago
1. Who selects the censor? You might be ok with <your candidate> making speech restrictions.. but are you ok with a hardline opposition candidate doing the same? 2. Governments change Even a government that starts using a power - say restricting access to bank accounts - for something good like stopping actual terrorism or money laundering can decide to start using it against political movements they don't care for. 3. Governments grow Governments only grow in power. They get bigger. They use more powers. Even some of the hardcore censor states started with more narrow objectives. China started with objectives to stop false information and external propaganda - now they use that power to suppress victims talking about sexual assault by party members. Fundamentally I do not trust any government to have that power. It will always be abused, and we must always resist it. Australia is an excellent example of a liberal democracy using safetyism to quickly run towards authoritarianism.
- ivan_gammel 5y ago
  Governments exist to protect those, who cannot protect themselves. If you do not give the government power to balance execution of human rights by restricting some of them in reasonable ways, the government will fail to protect vulnerable minorities and eventually your democracy will be destroyed by those, who will exploit the power of media to promote their agenda and to attack people, who have different ancestry, beliefs or do not fit in that agenda in other ways. The government should not remain unchecked, of course, so voters must have the power to replace them in a democratic process, that’s it. Nobody invented yet a better system, that actually could work.
  - tpush 5y ago
    Or, you know, the government restricts human rights in "reasonable ways" that are not reasonable for a given minority. Historically it's largely been abuses of governmental power that resulted in atrocities.
    - ivan_gammel 5y ago
      Historical lessons are important but it’s a very long stretch from atrocities of the past to this specific law in Germany — so long that I don’t really understand how is this related.
kkfx 5y ago
> One calls it censorship, someone else calls it protection of democracy and freedoms Yes, only those are dictators or wannabe dictators... In Democracy they are free to speak, also against Democracy, after they grab power no one are free anymore... > today USA is deciding to violate right of property for Russian oligarchs because rights of Ukrainian citizen are violated. Really? Did you look for something more tangible than mass-consumption Bernaysian propaganda? Start with this old governmental (EU) report: https://www.osce.org/files/f/documents/e/7/233896.pdf https://www.osce.org/files/f/documents/e/7/233896.pdf go to the USA think tanks side like https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html and https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_briefs/RB10000/RB10014/RAND_RB10014.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_briefs/R... and also far in the past https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/AERODYNAMIC%20%20%20VOL.%205%20%20(DEVELOPMENT%20AND%20PLANS)_0004.pdf https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/AERODYNAMIC%20%20%20VOL... who is actually violating what? > Right for free movement was restricted during Covid pandemic Witch is another scandal, actually one per WHO pandemic declaration... Again I suggest some official governmental sources one from the last pandemic for instance: https://assembly.coe.int/CommitteeDocs/2010/20100126_Statement%20Wodarg.pdf https://assembly.coe.int/CommitteeDocs/2010/20100126_Stateme... Yes, Democratic Civil Rights are regularly violated and they are because that's mean profit for some until the people remember that in Democracy they rule and arise. Only they tend to remember that way too late, when arising it's not just a legal action or a protest but a civil war and they are so easy to influence that's they tend to be quickly steered/diverted. That's the real issue: how can we have Democracies when we do not have Citizens but only subjects/people? How in the history Democracy happen?
lupire 5y ago
The reason free speech is special is that it can be used to rescuscitate the other rights if they are infringed, at far lower catastriphic risk than, say, freedom to bear arms.

sieabahlpark 5y ago

Any censorship is disgusting and should be rejected. Regardless of context. Disagreement with that means you're a threat to democracy, period.

croes 5y ago

So because others are worse Germany's laws are good? I don't know but laws that allow someone to be locked up indefinitely without conviction don't sound like freedom to me.

ivan_gammel 5y ago
What laws are you referring to specifically?
- croes 5y ago
  Bavarian Police Act

swayvil 5y ago

Democracy is a conversation where we, as a society, craft policy. What makes it a democracy is that all members of society participate in that conversation. Freely. Anything less is mere tyranny. But if we need a way to manage spam, lies and the other poisonous forms of conversation, then empower the individual to handle that. Because we do not trust you.

ivan_gammel 5y ago
>What makes it a democracy is that all members of society participate in that conversation. Freely. Anything less is mere tyranny. I guess the keyword there is „that“, right? Freedom of speech should not be restricted if it helps to support the democracy, but OTHER conversations are different matter. As I said, freedom of speech is not absolute and is checked by other freedoms and rights.
- swayvil 5y ago
  To suggest that any conversation is more deserving of a guarantee of sincerity than any other seems bad. Should we assume that there is an invisible man between us, transforming our words? That seems really bad to me.
- flenserboy 5y ago
  Freedom of speech is foundational for other rights. Take that away, and the other rights might as well not exist.
  - ivan_gammel 5y ago
    This is not correct. Nobody takes it away. It is limited by other rights through the laws that explain when and how the rights should be balanced.
    - flenserboy 5y ago
      Talk of "balances between rights" always ends up in restrictions on liberty. Communitarianism sounds possibly workable until you start to realize that those making the laws you mention (if you're lucky to get them instead of vague guidelines, and then Katie bar the door) and those adjudicating the laws will only decide on the side of whatever benefits them and their cronies. That's taking away freedom of speech, that's taking away all sorts of rights. Liberty is too precious to leave it to politicians and bureaucrats.

car_analogy 5y ago

You are defending generic restrictions on speech, but the NetzDG makes very specific restrictions - such as prohibitive (up to €50 million) fines if something claimed to be illegal (by a mere complainant, not a court order) is not taken down within 7 days, and within 24 hours if it is "clearly illegal", resulting in severe chilling effects. Try to defended those instead. (Yes, no fine is levied if the content is not taken down, and turns out to not be illegal. What sane company will take such a risk?)

ivan_gammel 5y ago
Do you have a precedent where this resulted in unlawful restriction of speech or it’s just a generic speculation? I had a look once at the form in one of Meta services to report hate speech: it does require some effort to fill the form and it does require the issue to be reported to police. If you don’t want to report the case to authorities, the platform will not take down the content. I do not see how this could result in a real censorship in a state with the rule of law.
- nfreising 5y ago
  I have looked at the NetzDG reporting on YouTube and Twitter and while both of them require you to cite a specific law the content is in violation of, they both do not require any report to authorities. The NetzDG doesn't require involvement of authorities, it was especially designed with the goal of moving the work from the state to private companies.
- usrusr 5y ago
  Laws that are bad because of abuseability didn't somehow transcend from good to bad the first time they were abused, they would have already been bad before that event. But you still have a point in so far as that you can't look at a law ignoring the legal conventions and processes of the environment where "the code is run", something that would be perfectly fine in one environment could be terrible in another.
- car_analogy 5y ago
  A few examples (though the reporting could be clearer): https://www.techdirt.com/2018/01/12/second-time-week-german-hate-speech-laws-results-deletion-innocent-speech/ https://www.techdirt.com/2018/01/12/second-time-week-german-... https://www.dw.com/en/facebook-slammed-for-censoring-german-street-artist/a-42155218 https://www.dw.com/en/facebook-slammed-for-censoring-german-... Fortunately for the defenders of that law, the notoriously opaque censorship of social media companies helps hide what is going on, so few examples surface. I could not find anything as convenient as a list of (wrongfully or not) censored content by this law. Often the censored party is not even told that the NetzDG was involved. Silence on this issue should not be confused with a lack of problems, however. For example, in Germany: “it can be a criminal offense in Germany to call another person a ‘jerk,’ or even to use the informal du, or ‘thou,’” to communicate a lack of respect for the recipient. German courts have penalized other similar “derogatory epithets,” including “asshole,” “bastard,” “old goat, “fathead,” “dope,” and “whore.” [..] German courts heard 26,757 criminal insult cases that year, leading to 21,454 convictions and 20,390 fines. - https://law.yale.edu/mfia/case-disclosed/germanys-netzdg-and-threat-online-free-speech https://law.yale.edu/mfia/case-disclosed/germanys-netzdg-and... To me this looks like a severe overreach of speech restrictions, even if one doesn't idealize the US 1st amendment, and accepts the need for some government censorship. Yet I've only learned about it just now, from a very obscure post.

cato_the_elder 5y ago

Those indices are ridiculous, and at best merely reflective of the values of the people who compose them.

impossiblefork 5y ago

Without freedom of speech you don't have democracy, or true freedom of association, etc. It's a critical foundational right on which other human rights are founded.

LeanderK 5y ago
this is not how the german state (or german democracy?) is built. Freedom of speech has bounds here and this can be defended.
ivan_gammel 5y ago
It is not foundational, it is one of the many rights that our society recognizes. In Universal Declaration of Human Rights it’s Article 19, coming after 18 other articles. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma... In German constitution it is Article 5 and it is explicitly limited, considering the importance of the balance. https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/German_Federal_Republic_2012.pdf#page7 https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/German_Federa...
- impossiblefork 5y ago
  It is absolutely foundational. You're talking about laws, but free speech isn't about laws, it's a notion of moral philosophy. The sense in which it is foundational is as follows: you cannot have democracy without freedom of speech, because without it there is no free formation of opinions. You can't freedom of association or freedom of assembly without freedom of speech. These latter are interconnected, because an aspect of freedom of assembly is to assemble to hold, for example, political meetings.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago

Speech can't hurt you. Speech by itself doesn't violate any of your rights.

bromuro 5y ago
Oh no, verbal abuses do hurt and in very subtle ways.
ivan_gammel 5y ago
Private property cannot hurt you, yet property ownership is restricted (e.g. you have to pay taxes). Restrictions often exist not to prevent immediate harm, but to make society functional and enable implementation of other rights. Restriction of free speech can be necessary if it is used to incite violence, thus triggering violation of other rights.

vorpalhex 5y ago

1. Who selects the censor? You might be ok with <your candidate> making speech restrictions.. but are you ok with a hardline opposition candidate doing the same? 2. Governments change Even a government that starts using a power - say restricting access to bank accounts - for something good like stopping actual terrorism or money laundering can decide to start using it against political movements they don't care for. 3. Governments grow Governments only grow in power. They get bigger. They use more powers. Even some of the hardcore censor states started with more narrow objectives. China started with objectives to stop false information and external propaganda - now they use that power to suppress victims talking about sexual assault by party members. Fundamentally I do not trust any government to have that power. It will always be abused, and we must always resist it. Australia is an excellent example of a liberal democracy using safetyism to quickly run towards authoritarianism.

ivan_gammel 5y ago
Governments exist to protect those, who cannot protect themselves. If you do not give the government power to balance execution of human rights by restricting some of them in reasonable ways, the government will fail to protect vulnerable minorities and eventually your democracy will be destroyed by those, who will exploit the power of media to promote their agenda and to attack people, who have different ancestry, beliefs or do not fit in that agenda in other ways. The government should not remain unchecked, of course, so voters must have the power to replace them in a democratic process, that’s it. Nobody invented yet a better system, that actually could work.
- tpush 5y ago
  Or, you know, the government restricts human rights in "reasonable ways" that are not reasonable for a given minority. Historically it's largely been abuses of governmental power that resulted in atrocities.
  - ivan_gammel 5y ago
    Historical lessons are important but it’s a very long stretch from atrocities of the past to this specific law in Germany — so long that I don’t really understand how is this related.

kkfx 5y ago

> One calls it censorship, someone else calls it protection of democracy and freedoms Yes, only those are dictators or wannabe dictators... In Democracy they are free to speak, also against Democracy, after they grab power no one are free anymore... > today USA is deciding to violate right of property for Russian oligarchs because rights of Ukrainian citizen are violated. Really? Did you look for something more tangible than mass-consumption Bernaysian propaganda? Start with this old governmental (EU) report: https://www.osce.org/files/f/documents/e/7/233896.pdf https://www.osce.org/files/f/documents/e/7/233896.pdf go to the USA think tanks side like https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html and https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_briefs/RB10000/RB10014/RAND_RB10014.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_briefs/R... and also far in the past https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/AERODYNAMIC%20%20%20VOL.%205%20%20(DEVELOPMENT%20AND%20PLANS)_0004.pdf https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/AERODYNAMIC%20%20%20VOL... who is actually violating what? > Right for free movement was restricted during Covid pandemic Witch is another scandal, actually one per WHO pandemic declaration... Again I suggest some official governmental sources one from the last pandemic for instance: https://assembly.coe.int/CommitteeDocs/2010/20100126_Statement%20Wodarg.pdf https://assembly.coe.int/CommitteeDocs/2010/20100126_Stateme... Yes, Democratic Civil Rights are regularly violated and they are because that's mean profit for some until the people remember that in Democracy they rule and arise. Only they tend to remember that way too late, when arising it's not just a legal action or a protest but a civil war and they are so easy to influence that's they tend to be quickly steered/diverted. That's the real issue: how can we have Democracies when we do not have Citizens but only subjects/people? How in the history Democracy happen?

lupire 5y ago

The reason free speech is special is that it can be used to rescuscitate the other rights if they are infringed, at far lower catastriphic risk than, say, freedom to bear arms.