Policing the internet in Germany, where hate speech, insults are a crime | 60 Minutes

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Cites FirmwareBurner · 2025-02 · on “DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data”

Having a slow and archaic birocratic system doesn't stop governments going totalitarian on their citizens. Case in point In Germany the Polizei will SWAT and arrest you if you post a meme on social media that angers someone's dignity. That's not a joke that actually happens. This typical German "our government is not slow and inefficient, it's just protection against totalitarianism" is pure cope. Edit: @helloplanets Source: [this video]

Cites sepositus · 2025-02 · on “It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds”

I'm just using common sense here. If you can go to jail or be fined for saying something inflammatory online, you don't have freedom of speech. My "there" comment referenced Germany since that was my example and where the 60 Minutes segment was done. You can watch the interview yourself here: [this video] It's worth pointing out the usage of "insult" in the interview. > "Is it a crime to insult somebody in public?" > "Yes."

Cites Clubber · 2025-02 · on “Jeff Bezos exerts more control of Washington Post opinion”

One example is Germany will now arrest you for insulting someone in public or online, including insulting politicians. The UK has had some questionable laws passed as well. Pockets of Europe has much weaker free speech protections than the US does, that much is for certain. 60 Minutes did a recent segment on German speech laws. [this video]

Cites fwn · 2025-03 · on “The Demoralization is just Beginning”

I'm not the parent, but one reference they made but didn't link was this 60 Minutes clip "Policing the internet in Germany, where hate speech, insults are a crime". It was a bit of a meme in Germany. [this video] Still, the author of the original article has some pretty polarising and crude views, and I think it's valuable to keep that context in mind. The key is not to be lazy and just dismiss everything that doesn't come from the smoothest PR media personality. For me, it felt like reading a frustrated author arguing against over-reliance on the service sector as an economy, given the dependencies it creates. There is certainly nationalism, realism/geopolitical views and a somewhat raw criticis

Cites FirmwareBurner · 2025-03 · on “European Cloud, Global Reach”

If you insist: [this video] It was pretty heavily debated on r/DE. [LINK] Please tell me how you think this "protect one's honor" law doesn't get abused. Also, an youtuber from my country made a video during the pandemic exposing the mistreatment of seasonal fruit picking workers from my country working in Germany, and the video got blocked in Germany by Youtube, most likely on request by flagging. So do do you expect to learn about censorship of German media if you follow German media which is subject to censorship? Do you realize the irony of it all? Did you ever expect for German media to go out and say "here's how we're censoring you"? Germans are living in Plato's cave allegory and are irate

Cites FirmwareBurner · 2025-03 · on “ASML's boss has a warning for Europe”

>US government's openly hostile attitude towards immigrants who simply exercised free speech Source for such claims please? German and UK governments are even more authoritarian on free speech. You can get arrested for a tweet insulting a politician: [this video] >the US has touted freedom of speech frequently and loudly when chastising autocratic foreign powers So did Germany and Austria and most of western EU. They were buddy-buddy to Putin in the past for their gas, and now they're buddy-buddy with Azerbaijan who's slaughtering Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh because EU needs their gas. [LINK] >to make examples of a handful of legal immigrants Source for such claims please? How many skilled lega

Cites StanislavPetrov · 2025-06 · on “OpenAI slams court order to save all ChatGPT logs, including deleted chats”

Germany, where they lock you up for criticizing politicians[1] or where they have a ban against protesting for Palestine because it's "antisemitic"?[2] Or UK where you can get locked up for blasphemy[3] or where they lock up ~30 people a day for saying offensive things online because of their Online Safety Act?[4] Or perhaps Romania where an election that didn't turn out the way the EU elites wanted is overturned based on nebulous (and later proven false) accusation that the election was somehow influenced by a TikTok campaign by the Russians that later turned out to have been funded by a Romanian opposition party.[5] I could go on and on, but unfortunately most other western democracies are

Cites DocTomoe · 2025-07 · on “EU age verification app to ban any Android system not licensed by Google”

The UK arrested around 12.5k people in 2023 over social media posts, according to the Times. Not all of them related to immigration at all (but I would wager: many are). It is sufficient to 'cause distress' - against whom, or in what form, or what qualifies as 'distress' is deliberately kept vague to maximise persecution rates. Some cases saw a squad car with six Bobbies take the very average, middle-class parents of a teenage daughter to the precinct to question them on why their daughter has had strong opinions on the way her school's new head was chosen [1]. While - as so often - no-one was later sent to a court for sentencing, the chilling effects are there, and I'd say half a platoon of