Can you not see the impossibility of regulating which speech is justified, and which is not?
Yes it's hypocritical and arbitrary when considering that we are all humans, but that is simply how law and society stratifies speech worthy of regulation. I don't think it's impossible at all.
The HN system which allowed people to downvote you is limiting your speech. Facebook removing posts about sex is limiting your free speech.
I find it really perverse that people are ok with banning people talking about sex, but are fine with them calling for murder.
Take a guess which society has tens of thousands of murders, and millions in prison? The one that takes away free speech about sex, but protects people calling to kill immigrants.
The murderer is the initiator. ISIS is the initiator.
Example: "The US should murder the Japanese people and nuke all of their cities immediately." Japan isn't an aggressor, hasn't invaded anyone, isn't slaughtering the people of some country they're trying to annex (ISIS). Calling for a response to to the initiation of violence, is not the same as calling for the initiation of violence. If you remove these blatant lines, you can never differentiate on a legal basis who is the victim and who is the perpetrator in acts of eg crime.
Facebook previously would allow hate speech(like calling for violence), but take down comments by people talking about sex.
There's probably no way to make this title neutral so we might as well stick with the original even though people object to it.
If people take offence, you will be persecuted. So it's a great law to further tighten the control over what can be discussed and what can't.
And if that wasn't enough, our government now allows NGO's and other non state organisations to police Facebook and other social media to prevent and contain types of thoughtcrime that haven't been yet criminalised.
No approval from a court needed, some privately funded NGO will in future decide for us.
I'm genuinely interested if you could link to something describing what you are talking about.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksverhetzung
The second item of StGb 130 (updated in 2015) is interesting here:
die Menschenwürde anderer dadurch angreift, dass er eine vorbezeichnete Gruppe, Teile der Bevölkerung oder einen Einzelnen wegen seiner Zugehörigkeit zu einer vorbezeichneten Gruppe oder zu einem Teil der Bevölkerung beschimpft, böswillig verächtlich macht oder verleumdet,
It states that if you attack/insult the dignity of a person or group with a statement, you are a to be punished.
This part in specific: "oder zu einem Teil der Bevölkerung beschimpft" -> or some group within the population without further specification.
So if a prosecutor feels like it he/she might persecute you for insulting for example Feminists.
Compare this with the version of the same law from 1871:
„Wer in einer den öffentlichen Frieden gefährdenden Weise verschiedene Klassen der Bevölkerung zu Gewaltthätigkeiten gegen einander öffentlich anreizt, wird mit Geldstrafe bis zu zweihundert Thalern oder mit Gefängniß bis zu zwei Jahren bestraft.
Seems more reasonable to me, only inciting violence is criminalised here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksverhetzung
It makes some things clear, what is allowed, what isn't and why.
People can still say they don't want immigrants.
What they can't do is ask people to burn down houses where they live or do 'vigilante justice' on them. These are actual things that people have asked others to do, and actually done.
Facebook previously limited speech for things like sex, but was ok with keeping up criminal posts calling for murder.
(The following is not so much directed at you; I don't know you, after all. It's just that I need to rant, as always when Americans lecture us on free speech. "You" is not the personal you, but "you Americans on web forums")
Don't mistake your version of free speech for a canonical implementation.
Keep your hate speech and school shootings, be proud of it, and bury your dead.
We just happen to live in peace and don't need or want your constant superiority complex in our face.
Just remember, after WWII you had a wonderful opportunity to force your free speech on us. You deliberately chose to force something else on us. And had it written in our constitution. Because Nazis. Now don't you dare blame us for having it. You wanted us to not extend free speech to Nazis. You wanted us to defend our new constitution.
You don't get to come back after seventy-five years and ask us to please be nicer to Nazis. And Scientology. And whatnot.
Have you noticed how wherever you engage in nation building, you never implement your political system? How come? Isn't your system perfect? Maybe it's only for the enlightened American people and other peoples are too backwards and savage for that?
Okay, maybe Puerto Rico, which is almost an American state. They have your system, as well. Except... all their political organs serve at the US congress' pleasure. Very colonial.
It's great that you identify with your system. Really. But please enjoy it. Feel free to tell us how much you enjoy it. But stop disparaging others who disagree.
We are tremendously bad at owning our shit. I wish we were better.
You don't get to come back after seventy-five years
and ask us to please be nicer to Nazis. And Scientology.
And whatnot.
I hope everyone here understands that I was not intending to be condescending, nor do I look down upon others for their opinions on this eternally divisive issue.
The main purpose for my comment "Free speech, European style" was simply to try to encapsulate what I was seeing in a short, "cute" phrase, with a subtle hint that free speech with restrictions is not really free speech. I do not wish to make value judgments about the various policies in this area, I just wanted to highlight the oxymoronic nature of the notion of "free speech with restrictions". Incidentally, even the United States contains restrictions on free speech, albeit to a lesser degree than perhaps any other nation.
With respect,
trav4225
Yeah, well, the only reason you live in peace is because of Americans with their free speech and school schootings, and the Soviets with their communism. We all saw what happens when Europe is left to its own devices.
EDIT: To clarify, hate speech is for example speech inciting doing harm to others. As a concrete example, in the heat of the refugee crisis, I was regularly seeing calls to arms to go shoot all the refugees at the borders on my Facebook wall. It made me cringe.
I would argue that's exactly what it does.
I'd further argue that hate speech and the threat of violence should be separated into two distinct categories for clarity. Clarity is extremely, extremely important when you're dealing with the edges of acceptable speech. It's dangerous to load them both into one concept that can be wielded by politicians and the media for control purposes over speech and free expression.
It's also important to clarify that the threat of violence is not a form of speech, it's a threat (of violence). That's another obvious reason why "hate speech" should not cover threats of violence to begin with, it intentionally muddles the concepts. Just like smashing someone in the face should not fall under free expression: it's an act of violence. Free speech ends at the point of violence, putting violence and speech together generates a contradiction of terms that can only benefit people looking for levers of control.
The concept "hate speech" is already a broken, frequently abused tool for controlling people. It's clearly going to get much worse in the coming years given the rise of extreme political correctness, the 'protect my feelings' movement. "Hate speech" is by default devoid of nearly all meaning, and nearly anything can be claimed to be hate speech, because "hate" is a generic term that can vary wildly and is inherently subjective. It was of course used for that exact reason: you can't legislate control over speech, therefore create empty jargon to do the same thing, and then load anything you want into it. A method frequently employed by totalitarian regimes.
Are my posts, which openly express my dislike of elves, hate speech? You bet. Why? Because I say so. You can never successfully refute that.
Either you support that people may say whatever the hell they like to say or you are definitely NOT in support of free speech.
Free speech, European style, is: let's cut the bottom 1% in public places--knowing full well it will necessarily be somewhat arbitrary, debatable and potentially dangerous--if it gives a much, much saner space for everybody else. That's a trade-off, and not an easy one: opponents to it will immediately ask "who decides", "what if they want to shut _you_ up", or they'll invoke slippery-slope style arguments. But, for all these issues, there is some point where the trade-off is a huge win for society, according to proponents. That's always debatable, but I think it is as reasonable a stance as the previous one.
Besides, it's not because a limit is very difficult to set that we should give up defining one. For instance, think about under age sex; who's to say what age is ok, but two weeks before is a serious crime? It is prone to the same kind of induction and slippery slope arguments as free speech, but most people (me included) don't argue about setting some arbitrary limit.
I always find the american worship of the constitution as strange. It's a bit like people that try to take the bible literal and forget to think about the actual meaning behind the words. Also the constitution is not a holy scripture. Several things in it have been turned around by 180°. We have way better documents to express the basic human rights.
Or argue that Muslim immigration is harmful (http://www.reuters.com/article/people-france-bardot-muslims-...), or correctly state the Bible's position on homosexuality (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/7668448/Christian-p...).
"Are my posts, which openly express my dislike of elves, hate speech?"
No, because that's really silly. The law would let you do that.
If instead you asked people to kill people, that would be taken down.
The GP was just as condescending as the GGP. His rush to stereotype Americans was largely comical. He makes it quite clear at the beginning that his buttons were simply (and easily) pushed; and this his rant was justified in his eyes. He simply emoted all over this thread to the benefit of no one but himself.
It is not my status as an American that I defend or his status as a German(?) that I attack when I point out the hypocrisy or limits in his version of free speech. Nor does my acknoledgement of those limits imply I am not familiar with the history and hypocrisy of the United States and its voracious appetite for hegemony, empire building, and oppression of peoples (including the restriction or punishment of ostensibly free speech) both within and without its borders.
This entire thread reads like a bunch of petulant children pointing fingers. Neither side defends the merits of their version of free speech nor makes salient points about the others' version of free speech; leading to no greater understanding and apparently prompting people to take sides in a conflict that doesn't even have to exist.
The latter encourages you to actually commit a criminal act, while the first is just an opinion that you might dislike or not and therefore criticise.
The First Amendment applies only to the government, but the principle of freedom of speech is broader. Large corporations, especially those that effectively operate as common carriers (e.g., ISPs), are rightfully criticized if they block speech due to its viewpoint. Facebook has a legal right to censor speech on its own website, but others have the right to criticize Facebook for doing so, and the principle of freedom of speech is a valid reason for such criticism.
Do you suddenly lose the right to tell people what they're allowed to say or do if your community becomes popular? How about if it's the leading resource in a field of study, or half the population end up using it?
Because this is what's bugging me about these arguments. Why can a community like a forum, mailing list, Usenet group, Slack group or subreddit choose what people can say and block comments for any reason, but say, Facebook gets criticised for the same thing? They're all communities, they're all privately owned...
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights for example does not say "it only applies to when a government are restricting those rights".
Article 19
1. Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.
2. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.
3. The exercise of the rights provided for in paragraph 2 of this article carries with it special duties and responsibilities. It may therefore be subject to certain restrictions, but these shall only be such as are provided by law and are necessary:
(a) For respect of the rights or reputations of others;
(b) For the protection of national security or of public order (ordre public), or of public health or morals.
Regardless, the real point is that property rights trump free speech rights. You can't come over to my house and say whatever you want, because it's private. And I'm pretty sure the UN DoHR says the same thing.
And further, given the leftist thing that it is, I'd bet dollars to donuts that the UN DoHR also says people have the right not to be on the receiving end of speech that incites violence towards them, a.k.a. hate speech. So... property rights > hate speech rights > free speech rights.
Article 12 prohibits "attacks" against "honour and reputation", which is vague enough to justify all sorts of "hate speech" prohibitions. (And ridiculous libel laws like in the UK).