German Politician Decries Censorship, Follows It Up By Suing Facebook To Have A Critical Comment Deleted
from the dirty-AfD-swine dept
Germany's terrible speech laws continues to be tools for abuse and stupidity. A recently-enacted law holds service providers responsible for lingering "hate speech" to the tune of €50m per violation. Social media companies have shown a tendency to over-enforce, resulting in the preemptive removal of things even the badly-written law doesn't consider criminally hateful.
Whatever damage social media companies are doing in order to steer clear of massive fines, politicians are compounding by using the law to target opponents and critics. Courthouse News Service reports a German court has indulged a politician's hypocritical outrage to demand the disappearance of a critical, but hyperbolic, comment posted to Facebook.
A leading German nationalist politician has won a court injunction forcing Facebook to ensure a user’s slur against her can’t be seen in Germany.
In a post, a user had called Alice Weidel, co-leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, a “dirty Nazi swine” for reportedly opposing same-sex marriage.
Immediate blocking of the comment occurred in Germany, but Weidel's lawyers complained it hadn't been vanished hard enough, pointing out that German VPN users could still access the comment.
The court's injunction would apparently force Facebook to delete the comment entirely, despite its legality nearly everywhere else in the world. Facebook's only comment, via Reuters, was to note it had already blocked the content in Germany, which is all the law really requires.
This desperation to remove a comment referring to her as "dirty Nazi swine" is especially rich considering Weidel had previously complained about censorship of another AfD party member. The first collateral damage from the new hate speech law -- which occurred less than three days into its existence -- nuked a satirical magazine's mocking of AfD leader Beatrix Van Storch's anti-Muslim comments. Van Storch was blocked by both Facebook and Twitter for these comments, while the German law took down a satirical bystander. That prompted this response by Weidel and the AfD:
The AfD appears to want to make the new social media law a major issue by testing boundaries and provoking a response from social media companies and law enforcement authorities.
AfD parliamentary group leader Alice Weidel wrote on Facebook and Twitter defending her party colleague and lamenting what she called the "censorship law," while sharing the text of von Storch's deleted tweet and repeating her complaints, while referring to "migrant mobs" instead of Muslim men specifically.
I guess Alice Weidel only dislikes government censorship when it targets speech she likes.
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Filed Under: alice weidel, censorship, comments, criticism, germany, hate speech, social media
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unintended consequences?
It probably shouldn't surprise us that Germany's post-war censorship and thought-crime regime has gotten Germans so used to the absence of free speech that even the "bad guys" can take advantage of Germany's political and legal climate that considers the suppression of speech and thought as not only normal, but desirable.
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Hate Speech is opinion by nature
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Re: Hate Speech is opinion by nature
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The Christian Bible also stated unequivocally…
it came to sodomy Christians were strictly warned to avoid
harassing sinners so they could be saved and not driven away.
Three times, no less, it says that it would be better
[for self-identifying "Christian" bigots] that it would
be better for them that a millstone be tied around their
necks and they be tossed into the sea. Pretty unequivocal. ;]
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Re: The Christian Bible also stated unequivocally…
“Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or tittle shall nowise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven.” -- Matthew 5:18-19
From this collection of fun stuff.
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Precisely, and while sodomy is still a sin…
any other sinners in the world. Jesus made us all equal.
That's why the millstone is quoted three times. All bigots
who stand in the way of salvation of any particular group
of sinners just because they hate those people and their
ways [while calling themselves Christian] prove themselves
antichrists, literally enemies of Jesus and his sacrifice.
Those characters never were real Christians to begin with,
and making themselves the enemy of God while convincing
themselves that they are fighting for Him is a sticky mental
trap that virtually none will escape. They are the ones who
will march proudly on Judgment Day but slink away in terror.
It seriously would have been better if they had died sinners
without ever having heard of or attempted Christianity.
Honest skeptics and atheists act better in word and action:
• They behave towards the weak or addicted with understanding.
• They stand for what they believe in with honest thoughtfulness.
Because they do so they are far more likely to become genuine
Christians and even if not; more likely to be welcomed as friends
while those who thought they were deserving are tossed out. ;]
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Re: never were real Christians to begin with
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Re: never were real Christians to begin with
of Christianity; but the existence of so many similar fakes
reliably indicates that there is an underlying reality which
trumps them all. Those myths are based on truth but twisted
to serve those seeking wealth and power in this world.
People all over this Earth have all kinds of beliefs but when
truth is revealed some folks tend to dump the false for truth;
because religion is not reality and reality is not religion.
It's the difference between hoping for something and
knowing it's real because you can see and touch it.
Realization that Jesus is the Son of a LIVING God tends to
blow away all that "religion" on contact, like antimatter . ;]
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Re: Re: never were real Christians to begin with
Wow. This is 2019, and Techdirt allows/encourages a platform for religious proselytes, who are gladly “tolerated” by the good ADL/Hillel/SPLC/Crisis PR factory/NGO unspecified flaggers brigade, because one whacky religion upholds and reinforces the other.
We’re f@cked.
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Re: Re: Hate Speech is opinion by nature
There must be a religious exception, like how adults who believe in invisible friends are crazy unless that friend is named "God" (citation: DSM-IV, Glossary, "Delusions").
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Pretty Standard...
It is not like she is alone with this as this behavior is pretty standard and not just with politicians. For some really egregious examples pick just about any US University.
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Did someone really say that
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Re: Did someone really say that
Here's the whole comment published:
https://philosophia-perennis.com/2018/04/24/alice-weidel-klagt-gegen-facebook/
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Re: Re: Did someone really say that
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Lacking on several points
Defamation is not protected speech, and even under the First Amendment, opinions may be defamatory if capable of being proven true or false.
Calling someone a Nazi swine may be an actual assertion of fact even if couched as an opinion.
Furthermore if the speech has been found unprotected by a court, the First Amendment would be no bar to an injunction banning republication of the speech.
If the speech in this case is not protected, banning its repetition does not raise the same concerns as the hate speech law de facto compelling service providers to act as censors.
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Re: Lacking on several points
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Re: Lacking on several points
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Looks like Tim really took that quote about a lie becoming the truth if you repeat it often enough as an incentive...
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