7 ms·
Sad that western Europe is pushing so hard for limits to free speech & privacy. I'm not surprised given their history, but it's sad nonetheless.
by mlh496 7mo ago
Sad that western Europe is pushing so hard for limits to free speech & privacy. I'm not surprised given their history, but it's sad nonetheless.
- touwer 7mo agoIt's not sad. It's smart to ban hate speech, blatant lies and things like that. We know, we had the Nazis. Seems the US still has to learn a lesson or two, considering the current political situation. Hope it will not be as bad
- LAC-Tech 7mo agoThis argument has always struck me as ridiculous. You think if only the Weimar Republic had had Hate Speech laws everything would have been fine?
- perching_aix 7mo agoRight, I guess the people there just magically all woke up one day hating the jews and voting in Hitler. Crazy how that happens. Why do political factions even spend money on campaigning? Those silly geese.
- LAC-Tech 7mo agoWait, your operating theory on why the NSDAP became popular is because they... tricked everyone into hating jews? You are not only entirely misunderstanding why the NSDAP appealed to people, you're also completely misunderstanding what post WWI Germany was - a republic hastily brought about with little care so that Woodrow Wilson would offer Germany peace based on his 14 points (he didn't). It was doomed to fail from the very beginning. If not the NSDAP it would have been some other extremists. The idea that freedom of speech was what led to its downfall does not stand up to even the smallest scrutiny. Or the idea that an aged, pacified 2026 Germany would immediately return to 1930s Nazism if they had free speech is even more ludicrous.
- bdangubic 7mo agopeople are sheep mate... in 2026 with the social media at politicians disposal you can convince most people of just about anything you want. current politics in the US is basically cultism. if trump says that Russians are now great guys, 99% of people who grew up during the cold war that are "maga" now are going "oh, what a turnaround, love them Russians now." same goes the other way, Germany can return to 1930s in the time one political campaign starts and ends given the state of society at the moment. I am not advocating for limits on free speech, I am a free speech absolutist. and with that come the consequences we see not just in the united states but around the world. but to think that allowing anyone to say anything cannot lead to absolute catastrophies/hatred/... in the year of our lord 2026 is very misguided...
- perching_aix 7mo ago> If not the NSDAP it would have been some other extremists. Oh okay, all good then... > Or the idea that an aged, pacified 2026 Germany would immediately return to 1930s Nazism if they had free speech is even more ludicrous. Can you think in even more absolute, even more reality-divorced terms? I was trying to mock this with my previous comment, but clearly that angle did not reach you. "Oy vey, the insane ideas I craft, that people aren't actually saying, are insane." Yes, they do be. Congratulations.
- Hikikomori 7mo agoWell they kinda did,long before the Nazis and der Sturmer put a torch on it.
- theandrewbailey 7mo ago"There is no time in history where the people censoring speech were the good guys." - RFK Jr.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- fungi 7mo agoBanning Nazi and ISIS propaganda doesn't and hasn't negativity affected anyone but Nazis and Jihadists. It's just plain good policy. I guess that's why arguments against it always fall back on straw men and hypothetical slippery slopes. There are plenty of actual things that do negatively affect societies free speech but this isn't even close to one of them.
- bitcurious 7mo ago>We know, we had the Nazis. Yes, I keep thinking about the bastion of free speech that gave birth to the Nazi movement. If only the Weimar Republic had anti-hate speech laws, perhaps the Shoah could have been avoided? Oops, turns out it did have those laws, and those very laws were subverted to suppress dissent.
- joelwilliamson 7mo agoI think tourer was arguing that the Nazis were a template for how to use speech restrictions to maintain power.
- dmitrygr 7mo ago> It's smart to ban hate speech Everyone has their own idea what hate is. For me: it is anyone saying any word with “a” in it. Better stay quiet, or it is hate speech.
- Epa095 7mo agoIn general the justice system don't care much what your idea of the law is. If its not clear through the actuall law or the accompanying comments what constitutes hate speech, it will be cleared up by the court itself.
- dmitrygr 7mo agoDo you really not understand the sort of slippery slope that presents?
- Epa095 7mo agoMy point is that this is the norm, not the exception in legal systems. It's good for laws to be clear cut and unambiguous, but in practice the world is not, and laws gets interpreted as courts use them.
- dmitrygr 7mo agoYes — a very clear and unambiguous “speech is allowed” is the correct solution. If your feelings got hurt, you can cry to your mommy. The world does not owe anybody comfort.
- stinkbeetle 7mo agoIs calling people nazis hate speech?
- calmworm 7mo agoA rose by any other name…
- stinkbeetle 7mo agoThat didn't answer my question.
- calmworm 7mo agoBut it did. Calling something what it is doesn’t matter one way or another. It is still what it is.
- stinkbeetle 7mo agoNo it didn't.
- calmworm 7mo agoOkay.
- generic92034 7mo agoIt depends. One prominent figure of the right-wing populist party AfD in Germany has been called a Nazi. When he sued the originator the court decided that, considering the circumstances, was not an insult in the sense of the law.
- stinkbeetle 7mo agoThat was argued to be a satirical skit rather than sincere statement I think. Which is quite an outlier but would be still probably quite interesting to compare with other cases. But in general if you were walking down the street or talking about something on the internet and somebody else called out or posted and said you are a nazi. Hate speech?
- roenxi 7mo ago> It's not sad. It's smart to ban hate speech, blatant lies and things like that. Blatant lies have to be legal. Firstly because it isn't philosophically possible to tell if someone is lying, it can only ever be strongly suspected. Secondly because it is a bog-standard authoritarian tactic to accuse someone of telling a blatant lie and shut them down for challenging the authoritarians. Banning "blatant lies" is pretty much a textbook tell that somewhere is in political trouble and descending into either a bad case of group-think in the political community or authoritarianism. The belief that it is even possible to ban blatant lies is, if it has taken root, itself a lie people tell themselves when they can't handle the fact that some of the things they believe and know are true, aren't.
- carlm42 7mo agoSad that the United States are pushing so hard to encourage the propagation of propaganda & lies. I'm not surprised given their history, but it's sad nonetheless.
- MiiMe19 7mo ago[flagged]
- NewJazz 7mo agoElon let a bunch of people generate lewd photographs depicting minors, then published it.
- MiiMe19 7mo agoAnd the pencil companies let people draw lewd drawings depicting minors. The typewriter manufacturers let a bunch of people write lewd stories depicting minors.
- NewJazz 7mo agoThey don't publish that on their websites, though.
- MiiMe19 7mo agoDoes X personally post ai generated kids to people's accounts or do people make pictures with a tool and post them on their own accounts?
- NewJazz 7mo agoX is not a person, it is a website run by Elon Musk. Elon, through his company, publishes the photos. I don't think it matters whether he posted them or not. He was aware of and encouraging of the practice, at least when applied to photos of adults.
- sublimefire 7mo agoWhat limits? You can do pretty much what you want but make sure you can defend yourself in the court. I feel there is a bit of a disconnect in terms where people get the news where in US you kind of expect biggest news providers to be biassed, eg Fox, hence reliance on social media. In Europe gov media is quite strong and objective, and the idea that it restricts something is odd. A great example is the banning of RT, they lost licenses IMO in multiple countries, but the agency was spreading a lot of lies. IMO what we all want is objective news reporting.
- PolygonSheep 7mo agoI have heard of RT lying but I have never actually seen examples of specific lies. Is there any list out there where they list any specific ones? If they do it a lot, it should be quite easy, no?
- Aloisius 7mo agohttps://euvsdisinfo.eu/disinformation-cases/?disinfo_keywords[]=keyword_81391 https://euvsdisinfo.eu/disinformation-cases/?disinfo_keyword...
- sunaookami 7mo agoThis is a propaganda website funded by the EU.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- wasabi991011 7mo agoHere's a source with some: https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html > The January 14, 2016, edition of Weekly Disinformation Review reported the reemergence of several previously debunked Russian propaganda stories, including that Polish President Andrzej Duda was insisting that Ukraine return former Polish territory, that Islamic State fighters were joining pro-Ukrainian forces, and that there was a Western-backed coup in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital.11 > Sometimes, Russian propaganda is picked up and rebroadcast by legitimate news outlets; more frequently, social media repeats the themes, messages, or falsehoods introduced by one of Russia’s many dissemination channels. For example, German news sources rebroadcast Russian disinformation about atrocities in Ukraine in early 2014, and Russian disinformation about EU plans to deny visas to young Ukrainian men was repeated with such frequency in Ukrainian media that the Ukrainian general staff felt compelled to post a rebuttal.12 > Sometimes, however, events reported in Russian propaganda are wholly manufactured, like the 2014 social media campaign to create panic about an explosion and chemical plume in St. Mary's Parish, Louisiana, that never happened.15 Russian propaganda has relied on manufactured evidence—often photographic. Some of these images are easily exposed as fake due to poor photo editing, such as discrepancies of scale, or the availability of the original (pre-altered) image.16 Russian propagandists have been caught hiring actors to portray victims of manufactured atrocities or crimes for news reports (as was the case when Viktoria Schmidt pretended to have been attacked by Syrian refugees in Germany for Russian's Zvezda TV network), or faking on-scene news reporting (as shown in a leaked video in which “reporter” Maria Katasonova is revealed to be in a darkened room with explosion sounds playing in the background rather than on a battlefield in Donetsk when a light is switched on during the recording).17 > RT stated that blogger Brown Moses (a staunch critic of Syria's Assad regime whose real name is Eliot Higgins) had provided analysis of footage suggesting that chemical weapon attacks on August 21, 2013, had been perpetrated by Syrian rebels. In fact, Higgins's analysis concluded that the Syrian government was responsible for the attacks and that the footage had been faked to shift the blame.18 Similarly, several scholars and journalists, including Edward Lucas, Luke Harding, and Don Jensen, have reported that books that they did not write—and containing views clearly contrary to their own—had been published in Russian under their names. I found that source on the Wikipedia page for RT after a couple of minutes. You can find more pretty easily.
- NewJazz 7mo agoIt's so sad US elites are so desperate for mindshare that they have to resort to dumping (mis)information on everyone else, everywhere.
- codethief 7mo ago> Sad that western Europe is pushing so hard for limits to […] privacy Uh what? :-)
- rdm_blackhole 7mo agoThe EU is pushing to intercept and scan all private chat messages and all emails to "protect" the children and give all this information to Europol to keep in perpetuity so they can build a profile on you but sure everything is peachy. Then you have the German chancellor saying that we should all have our real names attached to all our online accounts but rest assured, nothing nefarious going on here. France arrested the Telegram founder a few months ago for no apparent reason and the French Justice minister also not long ago wanted to ban EtoE because it makes their job harder so wouldn't it be nice if everyone could just simply share their private life with the government voluntarily? The UK is looking into getting rid of VPNs to, you guessed it, "protect the children" and Denmark has re-introduced blasphemy laws. Finally there is the DMA that has been approved the EU which outlaws hate speech on online platforms except that hate speech is never defined in the text so you can pretty much use this law to ban any content you want without due process and without consulting the population. The US has many flaws, nobody is denying that but to assume that the EU has better privacy is a mirage from a bygone era. The EU politicians are now looking at what China is doing and use that as playbook.
- mortarion 7mo agoCompared to the USA, we have incredible privacy in the EU.