German Prosecutors Think It’s Funny People’s Homes Are Being Raided And Their Devices Seized Because They Said Stuff On The Internet
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from the be-the-stasi-you-wish-to-see-in-the-world dept
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P [email protected] shared this topic
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If this is happening in east Germany, it would not surprise anyone that hate speech is on an insanely high and dangerous level. Most of the afd nazi voters are in east Germany. Should you be criminally charge for a call to murder, voilence genocide and other racism, holocaust denial? Absolutely.
Lets not pretend that neo Nazis are political satire geniuses. -
I'm not from East Germany, and not inclined to argue with those justifications. They sound valid and despicable.
Let's also not pretend that this law which is justified for the reasons in your post is being consistently applied to those ends.
The article mentions that they are hitting 95% rate of failure to convict, which tells me that the laws are being applied capriciously.
Speech laws being applied capriciously are definitely a tool in the despot's pocket, and the article also mentions seizures that were unlawful and apparently politically driven. Insulting politicians should never result in charges or property seizure like this, especially when the laws being wielded purport to protect the vulnerable.
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The laws will always be applied inconsistently.
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A quick search and you will notice that the people suddenly concerned about Germanies hatespeech laws are trustworthy folks like jd vance, trump and other far right actors. Also the fact that procecusion doesn't happen often, shows that it is enforced with causion and not arbitrary like in the case of the current US deportation nightmare. That is abuse of power.
Maybe the US wouldn't have trumps fascist takeover, if they had speech laws, like in Germany. -
As someone who had their tech confiscated by german police (not due to hatespeech though but something else I do not wish to talk about) I can tell you, suddenly loosing pretty much all of your hardware is no fun at all. Especially since you won't be seeing it again for a long time, in my case it took about 2 years and that was with a settlement outside of court.
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It doesn't take calls for murder or genocide. In Germany you can have your house raided for posting a meme which calls the minister of economy an idiot. The same minister of economy who doesn't know what a bankruptcy is, and whose entire working experience is as an author of children's books.
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The article focuses on Lower Saxony, which is in West Germany. These cases are not about inciting violence or denying a genocide but about saying something about politician that that person doesn't like. Many American liberals would be prosecuted under these laws right now for the stuff that is said on e.g. Reddit, presumably BlueSky and Lemmy.world. Reminder that this sort of stuff also affects pro-Palestine activists and in fact from what I gather that is in fact case in Germany today.
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So just because people you don't like express concern about something means that it automatically must be false? This type of "logic" is very dangerous. And prosecution clearly does happen a lot. Literally 10 cases a day in one German state according to the article and only 0.5 of those cases actually result in conviction, which means that clearly this is used to intimidate and punish people generally rather than a sincere attempt to enforce the law.
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For calling a politician a pimmel?
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Uh, did your account get hacked?
That's like literal AfD propaganda you are repeating here.
And while there is some very limited truth to the first (but he has had similar competences on state level for many years), the "opposition newspaper" is like an actual extreme right wing rag and the legal process is still ongoing, the courts just ruled that the minister of interior overstepped her official competence by trying to shut it down in the legally grey area way she tried doing it.
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Hope y'all remember how we had the propaganda blitz about the made up social credit system in China that everybody in the west was freaking out about. Well, now we can see what that actually looks like in real life.
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Germany is a wild place.
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Intellectually lazy opinion piece. It's outrage fuel, not acknowledging that the topic is a bit more complex than conveyed by a short "60 Minutes" clip.
For those worried about free speech in Germany: it's fine
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Damn don't get me wrong I'm against hate speech but government is not the one to decide what is hate speech and what is not that's how a democracy is destroyed.
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The government didn't decide that though, courts do. As long as that still holds, that's exactly how democracies are not destroyed, isnt it? I think, German law enforcement may be overstepping their boundaries in these cases and for example in the case of Andy Grote mentioned in the article, the actions taken were actually ruled to have been illegal (in court). Honestly seems more like a democracy doing democracy things.
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Imagine if half of liberal America was prosecuted for calling Trump "orange cheeto" or saying he has small hands. WTF is this even.
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courts are part of the government…
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No, courts are just naturally occuring phenomenon, like the weather or the tides
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These kind of laws are gonna get used against political dissent and rivals by the government. It's so obvious honestly if you can't see it then I don't know what to say
