5 ms·

"as almost anything now can be interpreted as 'offensive' or 'hate speech'" Are you serious here? In russia you get problems for calling a war a war and worse

• antonymoose 10mo ago
  In Germany you can receive a suspended sentence for raping a minor and then an actual jail sentence for insulting the rapist. I’ve seen similar outrageous arrests for mean tweets in the UK. Europe has lost its mind about right and wrong.
  • lukan 10mo ago
    I am german and live here, but am not aware of such rulings. Please provide sources.
    • aljgz 10mo ago
      As upvotes are not visible, I also ask for a few occurrences of this.
    • antonymoose 10mo ago
      The “Maja R” case would be a good start.
      • lukan 10mo ago
        Threats of violence, not insults.
    • sanskritical 10mo ago
      Because this thread started in a discussion about the United Kingdom, I think it is relevant to cite how this exact scenario did happen in the United Kingdom. https://www.facebook.com/piersmorganuncensored/videos/elizabeth-kinney-the-mum-who-was-arrested-for-using-a-slur-word-in-private-text-/25218375061188976/ https://www.facebook.com/piersmorganuncensored/videos/elizab... Elizabeth Kinney was arrested for a homophobic slur used privately in a text message to a third party -- not even a public comment -- against a man who physically beat her. The man served no jail time for beating her.
      • santoshalper 10mo ago
        Do you have a credible source?
        • sanskritical 10mo ago
          IBTimes: https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/terrified-naked-mum-four-arrested-after-texts-branded-hate-speech-1759907 https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/terrified-naked-mum-four-arrested-... Daily Mail: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15302729/Assault-victim-convicted-homophobic-hate-crime.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15302729/Assault-vi... The Sun: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/37356128/mum-convicted-hate-crime-text-attacker/ https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/37356128/mum-convicted-hate-cr... MSN: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/crime/general/terrified-and-naked-mum-of-four-arrested-after-texts-branded-hate-speech/ar-AA1RC2ta https://www.msn.com/en-gb/crime/general/terrified-and-naked-... Inkl: https://www.inkl.com/news/terrified-and-naked-mum-of-four-arrested-after-texts-branded-hate-speech https://www.inkl.com/news/terrified-and-naked-mum-of-four-ar... Revolver News: https://revolver.news/2025/12/uk-mother-arrested-faced-10-years-for-insulting-faggot-who-attacked-her/ https://revolver.news/2025/12/uk-mother-arrested-faced-10-ye...
          • daveguy 10mo ago
            So, no.
            • sanskritical 10mo ago
              At this point, assertions such as these are a form of ad hominem fallacy against half of society. You are discrediting the multitude of sources who have covered this story because of the nature of the speaker while no hardline liberal outlets have covered this story at all and presented a counterargument. If you want to have an alternative narrative, you need to link a major outlet showing her to be a liar. The case has been presented to the public. You don't like the people presenting the case. That doesn't invalidate the case. You must, at this point, present a member of your team making a reasonable, evidenced based deconstruction of her claims. The fact that there isn't any coverage from your side at all of this incredibly well televised and written embarrassment for the legitimacy of crown prosecutors speaks volumes. The UK is extremely litigious in regards to libel. Her lying would be an act of public libel against the crown prosecutor. She went on TV to talk about it. It's been well covered in everything from the IB Times to The Sun to the Daily Mail (as linked above), as well as fully televised on Piers Morgan. Naturally the team you obviously root for can just refuse to cover any prosecutions which are embarrassing for them and you can simply smugly say "well it's not in any source I personally recognize as valid so it didn't happen."
    • vluft 10mo ago
      Maja R.
    • samuel 10mo ago
      Is this source trustable? (I have no idea, I'm not german) https://www.welt.de/vermischtes/kriminalitaet/article252178370/Vergewaltigung-Frau-muss-wegen-Hasskommentar-in-Arrest-Verurteilter-bleibt-frei.html https://www.welt.de/vermischtes/kriminalitaet/article2521783...
      • lukan 10mo ago
        The source is somewhat trustable mainstream but not really good, as already the headline is wrong. The other person was not jailed for insults against the rapists, but threats of violence. And that is a attack on the state monopol of violence itself, hence the harsh sentence. But indeed, the rulings against the rapists don't seem allright and very much out of balance with the other sentence.
        • phkx 10mo ago
          It appears that the ruling regarding the rapes was not so straight forward [1], certainly not something that you can use as a one-line argument. There are also other articles describing what presumably happened there in 2020. Regarding the case of 'Maja R.', here's a summary [2] (e.g. she didn't show up for the first two hearings [3] - that would certainly raise the anger of the righteous if somebody not in their favor did that). I'm in doubt whether this one case is sufficient to prove the downward spiral that some people claim to perceive (it was also brought up in context of migration here on HN recently, and from the sources which I could find I‘m not sure it fully qualifies there either). [1]: https://www.mopo.de/hamburg/details-aus-dem-prozess-darum-kamen-acht-stadtpark-vergewaltiger-mit-bewaehrung-davon/ https://www.mopo.de/hamburg/details-aus-dem-prozess-darum-ka... [2]: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/57113 https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/57113 [3]: https://www.mopo.de/hamburg/ehrloses-vergewaltigerschwein-20-jaehrige-nach-hetze-gegen-mann-verurteilt/ https://www.mopo.de/hamburg/ehrloses-vergewaltigerschwein-20...
    • peterhadlaw 10mo ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bMzFDpfDwc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bMzFDpfDwc
  • Der_Einzige 10mo ago
    re: "Europe has lots its mind about right and wrong", at least the majority of europoors don't mutilate their baby boys at birth. Until US circumcision rates are below 30% of male babies, the US has literally no moral high ground what-so-ever.
• sanskritical 10mo ago
  > What you cannot do is calling for violence against them. This is blatantly disingenuous. The Public Order Act 1986, Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 and the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 all criminalize "insulting" and "abusive" words, or any public display of literature that is "insulting" or "abusive" -- much more than calls for violence: > A person who uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or displays any written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting, is guilty of an offence if— > (b) having regard to all the circumstances racial hatred is likely to be stirred up thereby. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1986/64/part/III/crossheading/acts-intended-or-likely-to-stir-up-racial-hatred https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1986/64/part/III/crossh... British jurisprudence has consistently put the likelihood of racial hatred being stirred up to the whims of the presiding judge. If the unaccountable bureaucrat feels like your comments could likely stir up racial hatred to even a single one of your cousins, even if there was no evidence of any stirred, then you are guilty. What exactly constitutes "abusive" or "insulting" is not only vague but applied solely to white Christians. Certainly a document that says polytheists should be murdered (Quran 9:5) or one that says Hebrews should "completely consume" all the people that they get control of "with no pity" (Deuteronomy 7:16) could be considered not only insulting and abusive, but outright threatening. But these statutes are only used to attack people saying "I don't like how many foreigners are in my country and they should be rounded up and shipped back." Whatever your position on this kind of jingoistic nationalist sentiment, you should be able to recognize that the hypocrisy and lack of liberty is stupid and dangerous and is going to eventually result in genocide (either of the native Britons by the new arrivals, or the latter in the backlash). Elizabeth Kinney certainly did not "call for violence" against the man who beat her. She simply, minutes after being physically beaten, used a slur in a private text message to a friend, and was arrested for it: https://www.facebook.com/piersmorganuncensored/videos/elizabeth-kinney-the-mum-who-was-arrested-for-using-a-slur-word-in-private-text-/25218375061188976/ https://www.facebook.com/piersmorganuncensored/videos/elizab... It is extremely suspect that every thread that Hacker News and other prominent and influential platforms has on these statutes gets flooded by people spreading deliberate pro-government misinformation, claiming that people are only being arrested for "calls for violence". Threatening violence against parties is generally punished by a separate, far more severe statute (Serious Crime Act 2007, which replaced the traditional mechanism for incitement so that it could be vaguely applied to overeager online comments) that is virtually never invoked for Facebook posts, because none of elderly people arrested under this statute are threatening violence. They are posting something considered unacceptable by the powers that be, because limitless immigration was rammed down the throat of the English without any regard to democratic will or desires.
• esperent 10mo ago
  I've been hearing lots of crazy things about people getting arrested in the UK for posting "memes" or things like that. So I decided to look for examples. All the examples I can find are clearly hate speech, policed more strongly than I would prefer but not that much more strongly, if I'm honest. The most egregious case I could find was someone arrested for a meme of a pride flag morphing into a swastika. Probably not arrest worthy but perhaps it was the last straw for someone with a history of hate speech. It's also hard to find examples because everyone writing about this has an agenda. So if anyone can find examples of people being arrested for things that are clearly jokes or memes rather than clearly hate speech, I'm curious to see them as well.
  • poszlem 10mo ago
    The flaw in your argument is that it assumes a clear and workable distinction between "a joke" and "obvious hate speech." Yet one of the strongest objections to the very concept of "hate speech" is precisely that we lack a reliable way to stop the term from expanding indefinitely. The case of Count Dankula is a textbook example: it is plainly a joke, and interpreting it as Nazi promotion or hate speech requires an extraordinary degree of bad faith. And yet, that is exactly how it was treated. https://www.vice.com/en/article/youtube-count-dankula-mark-meechan-nazi-dog/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/youtube-count-dankula-mark-m...
    • lukan 10mo ago
      "The flaw in your argument is that it assumes a clear and workable distinction between "a joke" and "obvious hate speech" That is usually easy derived from the context and the cases I know of "missunderstanding a joke" was rather deliberate misinterpretation of the law to get someone out of line. Your example seems like this as well.
    • phatfish 10mo ago
      Ah yes, that famous "joke" which evolves a Nazi salute after antisemitic phrases are said. I think Israel is undermining the Jewish cause with their current label-everything-we-dont-like-as-antisemitic rhetoric. But this "joke" is probably where the line should be drawn for actual antisemitic behaviour. Whether the person was an antisemite or not, just don't go there. There is no reason to. As a joke between you and your girlfriend, maybe. But not broadcasting it to the whole world on Youtube.
• poszlem 10mo ago
  Lol. How about "praying silently outside of an abortion clinic"? - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g9kp7r00vo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g9kp7r00vo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gze361j7xo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gze361j7xo How about calling a natal male a "he" - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6687123/Mother-arrested-children-calling-transgender-woman-man.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6687123/Mother-arre... Or perhaps: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/graham-linehans-arrest-uk-online-speech-laws-backlash-1235421213/ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/graham... OBVIOUSLY there is a difference between Russia and the UK, obviously Russia is worse. But saying "the only thing you can't do is call for violence against them" is a completely dishonest characterisation of the situation, when we've seen documented cases of police overreach and people being arrested for thought crimes.
  • kolektiv 10mo ago
    Ok, there's some context missing from those summaries though, no? In the first case it's not just "arrested for praying" it's "arrested for being in an exclusion zone specifically designated to try and stop you harassing people undertaking a lawful activity". They would have been arrested regardless of activity, it's effectively a restraining order and describing it as "for praying" is nonsense. In the second case, it was not about misgendering someone - they were accused of a campaign of persistent harassment, something which the Daily Mail fails to mention except as a minor aside near the end of the article (not untypical of the Mail, naturally). The Linehan case was debatable, and the approach taken probably wrong in some forms by the police (as admitted) but they were not arrested for simply voicing an opinion, but for behaviour which was sufficiently threatening and/or assaulting for the police to believe that a crime may have been committed and thus warrant further action. There are cases of overreach, that applies outside of the speech issue as well - and indeed for any country with a reasonably effective policing system, it's never perfect. But these cases are not the simple slam-dunk that people will try and paint them as.
    • naasking 10mo ago
      > In the first case it's not just "arrested for praying" it's "arrested for being in an exclusion zone specifically designated to try and stop you harassing people undertaking a lawful activity". They would have been arrested regardless of activity, it's effectively a restraining order and describing it as "for praying" is nonsense. I think part of the absurdity being pointed out is that "just standing there with your eyes closed and silently praying" is considered "harassment" at all. It just stretches the meaning of the word part the point where it seems meaningful. Edit: I think this ultimately becomes a Sorites paradox. Obviously a whole mob of people gathered around an abortion clinic and silently praying while you're trying to enter is intimidating and should qualify as harassment, but one person doing that clearly is not. There is no point at which the number of people become "a mob" though.
• orbital-decay 10mo ago
  South Korea had ID-based web for two decades, everything you say is recorded and tied to your identity, forever. Please do educate yourself about the state of the political speech in the Korean part of the web.
  • realityfactchex 10mo ago
    Ok, here are some starting links and summaries: In 2012, South Korean judges found the following to be unconstitutional [0], e.g. based on the person who complained about not being allowed to comment anonymously on YouTube and other sites (since Korean YouTube and other sites needed them to identify their real identity first): 1. Act to Promote Use of Communications Network and to Protect Information (as amended by Act No. 9119 of 13 June 2008) 2. Article 29 and Article 30, Paragraph 1 of the Enforcement Decree of the said Act (as amended by the Presidential Decree No 21278 of 28 January 2009) Also, the Korean "Real Name" requirement was "rolled back", as reported at [1], which describes that "Article 44-5 of the Act on Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Data Protection, etc. (the 'ICN Act') was enacted in 2007... It required large-scale portal sites with more than 100,000 visitors on average a day to record the real name identities of visitors posting comments, usually via the poster's resident registration number (RRN).". [0] "Constitutional Court of Korea, 2010 Heon Ma 47, 252 (consolidated), Re: Confirmation of unconstitutionality", https://www.opennetkorea.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Korean-real-name-law-decision-english.pdf [1] "Korea Rolls Back ‘Real Name’ and ID Number Surveillance" (2012), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2187232
  • nephihaha 10mo ago
    South Korea was under the Park dictatorship for a big chunk of its history. Most of Europe was under dictatorship of one kind or another within living memory. Seems some people can't lose that mentality.
• jjgreen 10mo ago
  Try holding a piece of paper bearing "I support Palestine Action" anywhere near a plod.