That may require waiting until a good English-language article appears, but the more significant the topic is, the more (and sooner) this is likely to happen.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/deepl-translate-be...
Wunderbar!
The German government has even tried attacking Gab, and regardless of what you may think of Gab, it is not a good thing if you do not want to find yourself one day having overslept living in a totalitarian regime. Just consider the implications of a foreign government taking action against a US website, wholly based in the USA, because it does not like things on the website that are no only legal in the USA, protected by the fundamental rights and laws of the land (Constitution), and are in line with all principles of human rights.
It would be evil and unethical for the USA to, e.g., use the US government to attack a French website for disparaging things about the USA or even just negatively discussing actions and behaviors of Americans, just as much as it would be evil for anyone else to do that.
We are entering a really dangerous situation where people are sleepwalking into supporting authoritarianisms, simply because they are conditioned to think they are part of the in-group. But that never lasts once the trap doors are slammed shut.
You either support freedom, free speech, and human rights or you don't; there is no freedom and human rights light.
You either are totalitarian in your ideology, or you have no ideology. Or something like this?
I am very pro free speech, much more than the average. But even I think there are limitations. It is not all black and white. Example?
"I think person X is doing not so smart things"
"I think person X is an idiot"
"I think person X is an idiot and needs to die"
"I think person X is and idiot and we need to kill him"
Where is the clear line from free speech to insult and then to inciting violence for example?
They are. The operators of the channel have an open arrest warrant for inciting hatred, denying the holocaust and death threats against public and private persons.
> wholly based in the USA because it does not like things on the website that are no only legal in the USA, protected by the fundamental rights and laws of the land, and are in line with all principles of human rights.
That changes when the "wholly USA" website is being used by German citizens, who are under jurisdiction.
>It would be evil and unethical for the USA to, e.g., use the US government to attack a French website for disparaging things about the USA
I's not about "disparaging things about the <country>", it's about running a website or service and not reacting to the fact that actual nazis are using the service. (You know with the eugenics and everything!)
If you think stopping nazis is authoritarianism, then you'd be the same kind of person that lets authoritarianism bootstamp all over them in the name of freedom. (Paradox of Tolerance)
Then block the website in your country. If I have no physical, legal, or economic presence in your country, I shouldn't expect to have to follow your laws. Do I need to start enforcing Thai lèse majesté laws too, now?
1. The law where a service is hosted applies. Entities in other legal jurisdictions may not be allowed to do business with the service (e.g. run ads on it) if it doesn't follow the law where they're located. Cost: people may be able to access content that's illegal where they live.
2. The law where the user is located applies. Anyone putting up a website must familiarize themselves with the laws of 195 countries where users could be and comply with all of them, or at least the ones that have a friendly relationship to the host's country. Service operators must block users from jurisdictions with laws they can't obey. Cost: this is a nightmarish compliance landscape only large companies can deal with; the internet becomes much less global.
3. Countries put up a Great Firewall of X. Cost: the hacker community has traditionally considered censorship bad; the internet becomes much less global.
1) If the site is run as a tor endpoint, and says "no German users allowed", I wonder how the jurisdiction thing plays out. (Yes, I'm asking HN for legal advice!)
2) The US recently had Mein Kampf toting neo-nazis working in the white house (Trump's PR team didn't even bother hiding this, and publicly praise Hitler's propaganda machine.) So, the US is pretty far down the Paradox of Tolerance rathole. At some point we'll need to flip the "Nazis must die!" bit like we did in WWII, unless the GOP corrects it's own course.
Apparently Pence publicly disagreed with our deposed dictator about the VP's ability to unilaterally overthrow elections. Trump didn't resort to name calling like he usually does. (Over 70% of Trump voters and 75% of Americans agree with Pence on this, for what it's worth.)
Maybe there's still reason to hope the US isn't headed to some sort of Apartheid-style "democracy", where idiots run everything and just ignore election results. Maybe?
Then Germans will have to prosecute those going to the website and using it or remove it from German DNS servers. Germany has no right to try and limit the rights of US citizens by extension of limiting those of Germans.
> I's not about "disparaging things about the <country>", it's about running a website or service and not reacting to the fact that actual nazis are using the service. (You know with the eugenics and everything!)
As much as I hate the Nazis, Nazi sentiment is not illegal in the USA as long as they stay within the law. The German government has no right to push their ideology and laws here. Again block Germans from the site or sue to have Parler block German user IP addresses (good luck with that, it won't last 5 minutes before the judge laughs and says "next case")
The laws against insults stem from a feudal honor system, it is not about dignity. Dignity != Honor. One is intrinsic, one is extrinsic. Of course there is a red line where an insult becomes defamation, but German law is quite old and laws are very slowly deprecated. There are still articles against blasphemy for example.
Common law countries are the much more advanced societies in this regard. But even discussing this in Germany is next to impossible. I would not recommend to even think about compromising with any demands out of Germany on this topic. The privacy approach is better, but the condemnation of "hate speech" only helped dictators around the world.
Also, unlike the previous block this one applies even to the users who are using the app downloaded directly from Telegram site and not the iOS/Google Play version.
The blocking happens after German minister of interior had a meeting with Telegram directors a few days ago.
On the other hand, if the book is prevented from being published or stocked in the first place, if school or public libraries simply refuse to carry it, teachers don't assign it, or if the information is not in book form, nobody cares.
As I understand it, writing/distributing child porn fiction in the US is against the law. Conceptually, that's the same thing; expressing ideas that cause no _direct_ harm to anyone.
Why? Germany has literally criminalised thinking the wrong things and denies people to associate freely based on the things that they happen to think.
It doesn't stop those people thinking those things and it doesn't stop people from associating with each other.
So if you have engaged in Holocaust denial, don't travel to Germany:
https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/canada/former-green-party-cand...
I wonder if Telegram will adopt the same thing they did in Germany here in Brazil to prevent the ban...
I read the article translated into English: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&hl=en&u=h...
Then, I went to read this person's Wiki page:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attila_Hildmann
He sounds like a reasonable person until 2015. I am not a psychiatrist, but this person sounds like they are descending into serious mental illness. How else do you go from a health food public persona... publish multiple cookbooks on the matter, the descend into some kind of 1980s "crazy person" talking about Holocaust denial, COVID-19 conspiracy theories, etc.?
This person needs help from mental health professionals. Plain and simple.
Please do not read this post as someone apologising for anti-semitic comments -- directly or indirectly. No, I reject (200%!) anti-semitic comments from _mentally healthy people_. This person has gone "over the edge"!
Does anyone else feel the same as me? I hope his family can get him help. He should go back to healthy cookbooks and forget about all the crazy conspiracy theories...
I don't find this particularly objectionable on it's own; Nazis and neo-Nazis never believed in free speech to begin with. However, we should still remain wary of false positives or scope creep beyond this narrow carve-out.
This will probably get flagged or downvoted to oblivion but meanwhile, no one bats an eye at the worldwide brushing under the rug of the Palestinian Apartheid.
The US would do the same with a Telegram/Snapchat group hosting AlQaeda supporters.
Given that MobileCoin is a new way for them to fund their operations without a trace, it's sound very attractive for these extremists to stay underground without exposing themselves due to Signal's E2EE than Telegram. Also, no censorship on Signal, so it is a free for all without the consequences.
Best part is, MobileCoin is just about to be a great pump and dump ponzi once they officially launch on Signal. Great value proposition for criminals and speculators.
Signal groups are poor at that. The work required to encrypt messages increases with group members. People don't want to show their phone numbers in large public groups, and Signal also lacks the group admin/moderation options necessary to handle many hundreds or thousands of members.
Telegram is probably the only tech in world, which has this unique mechanism of communicating. Cloud backup, groups/channels, anonymous usernames, e2e encryption feature (1 to 1, not by default), censorship resistance more than other messaging/social media companies, all bundled together.
Germany can just get the app removed from app stores:
https://voi.id/en/technology/114013/senior-german-official-a...
And this is true of other centralized software:
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2021/09/18/the-freest-platform-...
It's hard to ban all those sites. Telegram actually has such widgets, but they prefer to rely on everyone downloading their main app. Moxie also complains that decentralized stuff is slow to change.
Germany is also one of those countries that blanket bans particular groups/parties in general, which the US didn't really do until after 9/11. Banning a group chat isn't much different.
Avocadolf's channels are public, you could access them on the Telegram web UI even without an account. The German government has tried to get the channel shut down for months now, after Hildmann fled the country and engaged in Holocaust denial (which is a crime here).
The problem is that unlike all other major social networks, Telegram refuses to comply with German laws (in particular the NetzDG) and has refused to name a contact person for the authorities so that egregious violations could be stopped. I read an article that claimed the only form of contact between German authorities and Telegram used to be a bilateral anti-terror coordination with the US FBI, which makes sense given the common problem of radical Islamist terrorism.
You make it sound like Germany is constantly banning political parties. There have been exactly two bans of political parties in the post-war history of Germany: A nazi party in 1952 and a communist party in 1956. Also don't forget who occupied Germany in this decade and made a lot of its decisions.
By mistranslating this to “censoring” you are using the language of those who are actively distributing fake news.
Giving you the benefit of the doubt, I hope that you’ll correct the title of the post.
[1] For example, this is a post in Telegram's own public channel https://t.me/telegram/167 [2] For example, this two: https://tg.i-c-a.su/ and https://rss.app/rss-feed/create-Telegram-rss-feed
I live in the US, I know infinitely more people that have been hurt by rogue showerheads than ISIS, yet even publicly saying that you support them and their aims can get you put in prison.
edit: "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" was a reason given for jailing US socialists who were protesting against the WWI draft.
This is no longer standing case law as it was overturned by Brandbenburg v. Ohio
Also, Germans aren't really the kind of people to protest on the streets. They'd much rather complain and complain and maybe change the position of their cross on the next ballot to a party just a small tip further left or right, only to then start complaining that nothing ever really changes and readjust their cross in the opposite direction in the following election. This cycle repeats since about 70 years.
So yes, if the Germans really did not want this kind of stuff, they would have to drastically change their votes. And bear in mind that the current government, which is the most dramatic change (to the left) in the last 16 years since the Merkel era, has already lost the goodwill according to surveys, with people already again favoring the Merkel party (e. g. said readjustment).
Does it matter? No mainstream party is going to legalize the Nazis again. At best they would look like they approve of nazis. Worst outcome is that nazis become political rivals.
You can do lots of crazy stuff and talk a lot of shit in Germany, but relavating the holocaust is off-bounds for good reason.
It is insensitive, but by doing it they are clearly anti-Nazi. They are not belittling the Holocaust and they are not comparing vaccine mandates to the Holocaust.
Reading the article leads to a better discussion. Link to translated article https://netzpolitik-org.translate.goog/2022/nach-gespraechen...
Not exactly like this. You are allowed to speak your mind as a Nazi. You may say you are a Nazi and also say why you think they are superior etc. blablabla.
You are not allowed, to wear certain symbols of NS times (swastika and co) and you are not allowed to deny that the holocaust happened and to glorify certain SS organisations.
Whosoever, in a manner capable of disturbing the public peace:
incites hatred against a national, racial, religious group or a group defined by their ethnic origins, against segments of the population or individuals because of their belonging to one of the aforementioned groups or segments of the population or calls for violent or arbitrary measures against them; or
assaults the human dignity of others by insulting, maliciously maligning an aforementioned group, segments of the population or individuals because of their belonging to one of the aforementioned groups or segments of the population, or defaming segments of the population,
shall be liable to imprisonment from three months to five years.
What you were referencing is §86 and §86a StGB.
So they do deny freedom of speech and freedom of expression to people that the government doesn't like (in this case Neo-Nazis).
The amount of mental gymnastics people do is astounding.
Local laws may change from place to place. What is maybe reasonable in place A (and we may both agree with) may not be reasonable in place B
Ask your lawyer. Not any lawyer but yours. Anyone else answering is likely to give you bad answers, especially on HN.
Atilla Hildemann used his channel as a one-to-many broadcast. He doesn't want a group chat.
Does not happen in reality, though.
There are Nazis in jail though for denying the holocaust (Horst Mahler) and for trying to incite violence (Landser). Not for expressing their nazi ideology, but for direct calls for murder.
It gets used. Because this secret chat does not save its history, it leaves no trace on the devive. So people who want to cheat on their partner, but know that their partner checks their mobile at times even installed telegram because of this feature (and they do not know what e2e means).
Surprisingly many people have this motivation. So many, that I know of persons who got problems with installing telegram, because their partner assumed - it was for this reason.
It's UX is far superior to any cross-platform competitor. On top of that, its client is open source and the servers have easy and free bot APIs. It also has channels, which broadcast your messages to followers and many secure competitors don't have such functionality.
It's not encrypted, but as it turns out most people don't really care about that in practice. If they would, texting wouldn't be popular in places like the USA. That's probably why people go to Telegram instead of Signal, ease of use is more important than privacy for most, especially in group chats that are generally about what's for dinner.
If something leaks, it's through users, not through someone listening in or MITMing the communication.
I don't see how that is much of an issue.
I can get the Android version from Google's store, which is uncontroversially subject to German law because Google has physical offices and a financial presence in Germany. I can also download it from telegram.org, which to my knowledge does not have a physical or financial presence in Germany.
Germany probably has the legal authority to order Google to stop distributing the Telegram app and can use that authority to pressure Telegram. What remains unresolved is the degree to which Germany can act against Telegram directly.
And? That's exactly what happened. The Telegram Operators were given a choice and they picked. If a US operator is given the same choice, they can pick no business with German users or remove the content the germans don't like. If they pick the later, you have no business to complain about that, really, since it doesn't affect you as US citizen.
>As much as I hate the Nazis, Nazi sentiment is not illegal in the USA as long as they stay within the law. The German government has no right to push their ideology and laws here. Again block Germans from the site or sue to have Parler block German user IP addresses (good luck with that, it won't last 5 minutes before the judge laughs and says "next case")
Nazis have no right to push their ideology here. Nor should they have anywhere. "They ought to be hammered back into the holes they crawled out of" to cite a recently popular music single in germany. All their ideology leads to is authoritarianism, oppression, violence and war.
I would also point out that Nazis didn't "collude to overthrow the government" until they were well in control of the police, the courts and the military. So don't think your 1st amendment rights or any rights protect you from them.
Gang injunctions (sufficiently, but not exclusively) prove that this is not true.
(I wish I was joking.)
You are allowed to make analogies and say "this looks bad, looks like Nazi-ism". But putting on the yellow star is way and far above and beyond that, it is claiming your situation is as bad as the people in those camps. So unless Antivaxxers/Covidiots are being treated just as badle as people in those campls, it's trivializing the holocaust.
That one clearly has a Nazi background.
Of course they do, every state on earth limits freedom of speech. In germany regarding certain topics even more so. But nazis are still allowed to express their ideology. This is a difference to a time, when also this was forbidden. (for example in the NS area)
At that point, the choice is not between "freedom of speech" and "censorship". It's "censor the Nazi" or "let the Nazi censor everyone else". You must choose the option that preserves the most freedom of speech.
And this goes for every other entity that threatens violence - not just Nazis. I'm only mentioning them because we're talking about the German legal conception of freedom of expression. Nobody says "I'm going to kill you" for the sake of it; they say it to terrorize other people into doing things they want, including things like not saying words they don't want spoken. This also goes for threatening violence against groups of people rather than speakers of certain words, and political speech that proposes using the state as a means to do the above. All of that is censorious, and as far as I'm concerned a definition of freedom of speech that does not include freedom from threats of violence is incomplete.
That being said, censorship by terrorism should be construed narrowly. One might have thoughts of, say, radical Islamic terrorism while reading the above paragraph. This would be an example of censorious speech. However, ISIS, Boko Haram, and/or the Taliban making use of censorious threats does not mean that the entire religion of Islam is guilty of the same thing. Same thing for Nazis or neo-Nazis - they don't make Christians or neo-pagans valid targets of censorship just because they happen to belong to the same religion.
[0] Or at least, some long chain of escalating legalistic rituals that we call a lawsuit, which is backed by the government's monopoly over violence within an area. This is a distinction without a difference.
Denying the holocaust didn't happen isn't a threat of violence. It is saying that something didn't happen.
Also a threat of violence has to be credible.
> At that point, the choice is not between "freedom of speech" and "censorship". It's "censor the Nazi" or "let the Nazi censor everyone else". You must choose the option that preserves the most freedom of speech.
This is a false dichotomy.
> And this goes for every other entity that threatens violence - not just Nazis. I'm only mentioning them because we're talking about the German legal conception of freedom of expression. Nobody says "I'm going to kill you" for the sake of it; they say it to terrorize other people into doing things they want, including things like not saying words they don't want spoken. This also goes for threatening violence against groups of people rather than speakers of certain words, and political speech that proposes using the state as a means to do the above. All of that is censorious, and as far as I'm concerned a definition of freedom of speech that does not include freedom from threats of violence is incomplete.
Your conception of freedom of speech isn't freedom of speech. It is "freedom to hear things that aren't too unpleasant".
As for the the chilling effect might work with some people. It won't work with others. With me it wouldn't work. I would tell them to "fuck around and find out". I won't live in fear.
So yeah.
My guess is that at this point Germany is saying that this could fall into the criminal side of things, at which point Telegram would care.
Not sure where telegram is registered, but can a foreign company have a criminal responsiblity by just being accessible in that country? I'm sure most of the internet violates some kind of ancient anti-something law, be it nudity or whatever, but noone really cares if boobs are illegal in afghanistan, why care if something is illegal in germany, if you're an (eg.) british company?
Porn sites are probably against the law in Saudi Arabia, but why is that Pornhubs problem?
If they don't go down the route of implementing a state-level firewall such as China is doing, they're fighting a losing battle. And frankly, if Telegram were inaccessible from Germany, the same people would simply use the next messaging app. There's nothing groundbreaking within Telegram that cannot be replicated.
IMHO, this is the government embarrassing themselves with the fact that they've lost the goodwill of a huge chunk of the population and trying to blame Telegram for it - as if the mindset and communication of those unsatisfied people would simply change/disappear if they were no longer able to access Telegram. Which furthermore shows that today's governments still do not understand the internet.
This should not be the responsibility of the website owner to comply with the laws of a country they don't have a presence in, presumably under threat of either extradition or arrest if they one day happen to enter the borders of the country.
If the website doesn't comply with the laws of the country, that country should block it, and that should be the extent to the action they can reasonably take. Unless you think Belarus should be able to arrest somebody passing through their airspace because, say, some other individual made a comment critical of Lukashenko on their blog?
> e.g at first more than a few American websites simply blocked all EU traffic after GDPR was approved
Those websites have parent companies who have an economic presence in the EU.
Of course Telegram is quite a bit more polished and fun to use than element or other matrix clients so far.
For what it's worth, the NRW Landesmedienanstalt is busy establishing a DNS-level censorship infrastructure against Pornhub, Youporn, MyDirtyHobby and others [1]. It won't take long until providers will be forced to also add Telegram's infrastructure to that list.
[1]: https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/landesmedienanstalt-kann...
Don't you realize that making comparisons to the Nazis is only useful before it gets as bad as Treblinka? If you literally have to wait until people are being rounded up and killed before you're allowed to say, gee guys, this looks kinda like Nazi-ism, then it's far too late. If that's the case then in fact you're not learning from the past but rather, forbidding learning from the past until the point at which it cannot matter.
The Nazis were horrific partly because they did forced medical experiments on people. Regardless of what our ruling classes try to claim, the mRNA vaccines are in fact experimental and people are being forced to take them. That is a policy straight out of Hitler's playbook. Making that comparison is not trivializing what he did, let alone "denying the Holocaust" - which is a complete non-sequitur. They're doing the opposite of denying the Nazi's actions, they're directly calling attention to them.
I think you should just face the music here: you don't like the yellow stars because they're a direct assertion that a policy you support is evil of the type seen in the past, and that therefore, maybe you are evil. Man up and argue why it's not marching in the same direction despite the overt similarities. Don't try and claim anyone pointing out those similarities are "denying the Holocaust" because that's quite evidently not true.
No, analogies are fine. Relativising the holocaust or denying it is not.
rnd[0] did a good report on this. The people who started the yellow-star-antivax trend are known and public holocaust deniers and nazis. Prominent figures here are also putting on the holocaust and the relocation of sudetendeutschen on the same level of evil.
>The Nazis were horrific partly because they did forced medical experiments on people.
Yes
>Regardless of what our ruling classes try to claim, the mRNA vaccines are in fact experimental and people are being forced to take them. That is a policy straight out of Hitler's playbook.
No. Source: All of medical literature for mRNA. If you're not willing to look for it, most medical scientists agree that mRNA, to all our knowledge, is harmless. It won't stay in your body more than a week anyways before it decays.
>Making that comparison is not trivializing what he did, let alone "denying the Holocaust" - which is a complete non-sequitur. They're doing the opposite of denying the Nazi's actions, they're directly calling attention to them.
They're not. They're saying that getting poked by a needle is as bad as being starved to death before being squished into a small chamber and brutally choked to death by gas. It's not funny. (edit: And if you don't trust mRNA, there is dead/alive vaccines available too)
>I think you should just face the music here: you don't like the yellow stars because they're a direct assertion that a policy you support is evil of the type seen in the past, and that therefore, maybe you are evil. Man up and argue why it's not marching in the same direction despite the overt similarities. Don't try and claim anyone pointing out those similarities are "denying the Holocaust" because that's quite evidently not true.
The truth is that the holocaust-deniers under the anti-vaxxers are already a minority, they're theories are absolute quack and at best they're not contributing to society, at worst they're destroying it. And yes, some of them are denying the holocaust. Others are relativizing it. Both of those things are bad, don't try to strawman my argument that I'm saying otherwise.
0: https://www.rnd.de/politik/judensterne-auf-querdenker-demos-...
"No. Source: All of medical literature for mRNA"
So if the scientists doing the experiments claim their experiments are A-OK, people being forced into them is OK? Really? That's the distinction you feel makes it not the same as what the Nazis were doing? If the Nazi doctors had said "we think our medical work is actually beneficial" you'd have said, oh OK then. Not a crime.
"They're saying that getting poked by a needle is as bad as being starved to death before being squished into a small chamber and brutally choked to death by gas."
They are NOT saying that and the fact you keep making this nonsensical claim is - again - proving my point to any bystanders who are watching. If you're representative of the average German then the Allies failed because you aren't drawing generalizable lessons from the past. The anti-mandate campaigners are drawing analogies with the Nazi practice of forced medical experimentation on people which you have already agreed was horrific. And that is worth comparing to the Nazis because history teaches us that people willing to take that step may well be willing to take others, which is exactly how we end up with pictures like these:
https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_p...
https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_p...
Do you see the danger now? The guy with the swastika symbol in the first photo has a sign saying "gas the unvaccinated". It should not be a shock that the actual neo-Nazis here aren't the people saying "leave us alone" but rather the ones saying "let's force people to take brand new drugs against their will". The latter was something the Nazis actually did. Making vaccines a matter of free choice wasn't.
People on the blocked Telegram channels have denied the Holocaust (including the channel operator himself) which is a crime in Germany, Austria and 16 other European countries [1] or called for the murder, disfigurement or other injuries to politicians [2].
"Anti-mandate discussions" are bad enough, but unlike what went on in Hildmann's channels this stuff isn't criminal so the comparison of yours is a bit wrong.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesetze_gegen_Holocaustleugnun...
[2] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/hunderte-morda...
On the other hand, forcibly removing content for the sake of the content is censorship. It can be censorship that most people approve of - which they usually do when the content is sufficiently vile and irredeemable - but it's still censorship.
And yes, content was censored on. But not only death threats were censored but also holocaust denial, eugenics and inciting hatred against ethnic groups (Jewish groups, specifically).
Project Gutenberg ended up complying with German copyright law even though they have zero presence in Germany precisely because they were bullied in this fashion.
The onus should have entirely been on Germany to block PG if they didn't comply with German laws, not on PG to block Germany so that users in Germany couldn't violate German law.
> The latter was something the Nazis actually did. Making vaccines a matter of free choice wasn't.
This overstates the situation. The Americans also required smallpox vaccine for the continental army, and the US currently requires MMR vaccine for participation in public school.
Requiring vaccination (of everyone, another key difference between the pandemic and the Nazi analogy, as the Nazis weren't conducting medical experiments on those they considered "master race") to participate in some aspects of modern society is part of modern society. Comparing it to the Holocaust trivializes the Holocaust.
Yeah, like "all jews should be killed". Good thing.
> It doesn't stop those people thinking those things and it doesn't stop people from associating with each other.
It prevents such things from being normalized and makes it harder for them to be put in action.
Yeah, I know what you learned in school that this is worse than actual mass murder, and that everyone should be allowed to advocate for mass murder so that they can be disputed in the "marketplace of ideas".
In reality, what you get is echo chambers that lead people to believe that they're part of a majority who thinks that mass murder (of the right groups, of course) is good, and then some of them start to think that it's up to them to just go and do it.
In reality, criminalizing thinking certain clearly defined wrong things protects the freedom of everyone.
Do you think it stops them from thinking that? Because you made is illegal.
It doesn't.
> It prevents such things from being normalized and makes it harder for them to be put in action.
This gets trotted out all the time and it is nothing but a sound bite. I haven't met anyone hear about an atrocity and genuinely say it was a good thing.
> Yeah, I know what you learned in school that this is worse than actual mass murder, and that everyone should be allowed to advocate for mass murder so that they can be disputed in the "marketplace of ideas".
No I didn't learn this in school. I have no memory of this ever being discussed at school.
I read lots of books about things like maintaining political power, how the state works and economics and I came to this conclusion myself.
> In reality, what you get is echo chambers that lead people to believe that they're part of a majority who thinks that mass murder (of the right groups, of course) is good, and then some of them start to think that it's up to them to just go and do it.
That doesn't happen. In fact the opposite happens. If you stop people from talking freely what happens is that they will only talk with people that they believe to be on their side.
> In reality, criminalizing thinking certain clearly defined wrong things protects the freedom of everyone.
It literally doesn't. Because it allows other less odious things to be criminalised when it is criminally expedient. That is because the precedent has been set.
No, it does not stop people from thinking that (and of course that is not what is made illegal). It stops them from publishing and spreading those thoughts, because that is what is actually made illegal.
> This gets trotted out all the time and it is nothing but a sound bite.
So you don't actually have an argument against it?
> I haven't met anyone hear about an atrocity and genuinely say it was a good thing.
Then be happy that you haven't met such people. They most definitely exist:
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/months-christ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Patriarchs_massacr...
https://www.hstoday.us/featured/extremists-praise-texas-atta...
> That doesn't happen.
That is exactly what is happening all over the internet. You have to wear pretty big blinders not to see it.
> If you stop people from talking freely what happens is that they will only talk with people that they believe to be on their side.
And those aren't gonna be a lot of people, so they won't be able to recruit others easily, and they won't start to think they're majority.
> It literally doesn't.
It very literally does.
> Because it allows other less odious things to be criminalised when it is criminally expedient. That is because the precedent has been set.
That slippery slope argument is so silly. There is no country on earth that has ever had absolute freedom of speech. Including the USA.
Germany has had very clear, well-defined hate speech laws since 1960, and it's ranked higher than the USA in the Press Freedom Index.
You'll have hard time convincing anyone that thought "Jews are inferior race and should be exterminated" should have the same right to be considered as any other. When we already thought this thought extensively and even based our actions on it and it led only to unprecedented nhuman suffering.
"Because it is not new it is okay". Sorry that isn't very convincing.
The issue is that if you ban one set of ideas you have set a precedent to ban other ideas that aren't as odious.
Using the same justification you can criminalise believing in the Earth is flat or any other fringe idea.
> You'll have hard time convincing anyone that thought "Jews are inferior race and should be exterminated" should have the same right to be considered as any other. When we already thought this thought extensively and even based our actions on it and it led only to unprecedented nhuman suffering.
I am not saying they should be considered equally. I am not saying that those ideas are equal. I am saying that someone shouldn't be criminalised for thinking or expressing such ideas.
If you the idea is crap and it proved that it's crap by leading to genocide why would we award it any protection?
Do tou think next time around, it will lead to something beneficial to mankind?
> Using the same justification you can criminalise believing in the Earth is flat or any other fringe idea.
It did not lead to genocide. The first time it does I hope it's banned to hell.
> I am saying they should be considered equally.
And what's your argument to support this request regarding the specific idea I cited?
No it wouldn't. This is a ridiculous argument.
> It's basically a free boost in optics and national pride that benefits practically all Germans at basically zero cost, because it's only banning the most obscenely offensive and pointless idiocy.
The cost is individual liberty. Which BTW if you haven't been paying attention has been eroded severely all over the globe in almost every western country over the last two years. So no it is not zero cost.
What about the average German's liberty of not having his country publicly badmouthed due to the actions of a few crazy nutcases? It's hard to seriously argue that this wouldn't happen, given Germany's post-WWII history. (Also I'm not sure why you're bringing up the 'last two years', the prohibition has been in place for far longer than that.)
> It's hard to seriously argue that this wouldn't happen, given Germany's post-WWII history. (Also I'm not sure why you're bringing up the 'last two years', the prohibition has been in place for far longer than that.)
The German government (not the German people) are the ones that are giving themselves a bad name by denying people their individual liberty. Those liberties include (and are not limited to), the right to speak freely even if that speech is unpopular.
Regarding the last two year. During last two years we have had individual rights eroded all over the western world due under the guise of controlling the spread of COVID. Just like we had our rights eroded due to the threat of terrorism at the hands of Islamic extremists.
Personally I was unemployed for 9 months because of the economic uncertainty caused by lockdowns and it depleted me of almost all my savings and almost killed my business. I owe about £25,000 (bank loans and credit cards etc) and it will take me another year to pay it all off at least.
No it doesn't stop that either. They just distribute it more covertly and use coded language which then the government justifies to take away more rights and ban things like E2E encryption.
> So you don't actually have an argument against it?
Sorry that is backwards. You need to show me that it is happening if you are trying to justify taking away people's rights. Repeating a sound bite that is repeated by politicians and journalists isn't an argument or evidence. BTW I've heard many of the arguments present and the "research" and frequently they were found to be lacking.
> Then be happy that you haven't met such people. They most definitely exist
So your examples are extremists which is a small number of people by definition. This is not representative of the whole.
> That is exactly what is happening all over the internet. You have to wear pretty big blinders not to see it.
No it isn't. You think it is because you go looking for it. This is known as cognitive bias.
> And those aren't gonna be a lot of people, so they won't be able to recruit others easily, and they won't start to think they're majority.
They can't recruit others easily because most people recognise immediately that these are nasty people and they want nothing to do with them. This is fantasy that a significant percentage of people will be sold on the "Hitler did nothing wrong" idea. It is a meme on the internet because people were making fun of internet neo-nazis.
> That slippery slope argument is so silly. There is no country on earth that has ever had absolute freedom of speech. Including the USA.
It isn't a slippery slope fallacy when we are sliding down the slope in the UK with people being arrested for "offensive tweets" and "posting offensive song lyrics".
So don't gaslight me about this. The fact is that we have been sliding down the slope in the UK for years now and people like you tell me erosion of speech rights isn't happening, when it has been clearly documented to happen in the UK. The same happens in Germany as well, I have spoken to ordinary Germans (not neo-nazis or extremists) that have found themselves in trouble for basically jokes.
As for the argument "the USA doesn't doesn't do it perfectly that it is okay to deny people of free speech somewhere else" isn't an argument. Also I am in the UK, not the US. I don't care about what happens in the US. You seem to be hell bent on throwing your liberties away.
> Germany has had very clear, well-defined hate speech laws since 1960, and it's ranked higher than the USA in the Press Freedom Index.
Telling me that the laws that curtail freedom of speech have been around for a long time and are well defined isn't an argument to whether they should exist or not and just because something has been done for a long time doesn't mean it should be done.
Don't care how great the freedom of speech is for people that in the right club (in this case journalists). It has to be for everyone including odious people.
As for hate speech that is a made up concept to curtail speech rights and has been used against ordinary people in the UK (not neo-nazis or extremists just normal people).
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I am so fed up with people (like yourself) who constantly gas light about these laws and tell me civil liberties haven't been eroded because of these laws, when they literally have and you can find example after example where this is the case.
More generally I was out of work for 9 months because of my government's response to COVID. It depleted me of most of my savings and I am now in debt which will take me like a year or two to pay off, I had zero debt before the COVID lockdowns. SO I don't trust the government to tell me the truth, I don't trust them to be able to do anything competently and they certainly shouldn't be able to legislate what can and what can't be said.
Lots of communists say that the Soviet Union wasn't "real communism". Yet I never hear the same outcry against that.
I am not saying it should be "protected". I am saying that individual liberties should be protected and one of the most important (after private property rights) is the freedom to speak you mind.
> Do tou think next time around, it will lead to something beneficial to mankind?
No.
> It did not lead to genocide. The first time it does I hope it's banned to hell.
When people questioned the idea that the Earth was the centre of the universe people were punished for such ideas. So that has kind of already happened.
It still doesn't justify curtailing individual liberties anyway.
If somebody breaks German law, that's their problem, and this is the convention for matters outside of the Internet, too. US CBP, for instance, doesn't hold the seller responsible for complying with import laws and duties, that's the responsibility of the importer. That's because it would be enormously complex to figure out the laws of every place someone is meant to sell to, whereas the buyer only needs to know the laws of where they live.
But I looked up what individual liberties it curtails, and there's something that may interest you.
The individual liberty curtailed is this: If something's banned, and someone sets up a replacement organisation, then merely being a member is punishable. The prosecution has to prove to a court that the new organisation is a replacement for the banned one, and any factual or dejure leadership may go to prison for up to five years, any other members for up to three.
The bit that will interest you is that this is quite similar to other laws. You don't have to kill anyone to have your liberties curtailed in this manner, mere economic crime will do. If you're convicted of economic crime, that may curtail your liberty to be Geschäftsführer etc.
In the case of Project Gutenberg and Telegram, the German side is the consumer, so it's entirely comparable. If the app or website is illegal in Germany, Germans who use it are the ones breaking the law here.
If I sell chocolates in America, and somebody in Germany where I have zero presence buys them, I should not expect to get arrested if I step foot on German soil because I used an ingredient banned in Germany. If I run a blog in America, and somebody in Germany comments 'Heil Hitler', I should not expect to get arrested if I have a layover flight in Berlin because I didn't delete that comment. To say otherwise is absolutely deranged. Germany can sieze my chocolates in customs - that's fine. They can block my blog - that's also fine. Your implications here are in utter contradiction to existing international law concerning the import and export of goods.
I challenge you to consider how it could be any other way - if the onus is on the other side, why stop at the website operator for not blocking Germans from their site? Is the host not also responsible? The ISP? Should FedEx be responsible for not inspecting their packages for illegal chocolates?
There are plenty of middlemen. There are the hosting services. There are the ISPs. There are the CDNs. If you're going to make Telegram legally liable for these matters, then why not AWS, ISPs, and CDNs?
