[dmichulke]

The problem here is that Nazi Germany also disallowed people to "speak their mind".

So if you say free speech caused Nazi Germany, I might as well say: Lack of free speech let Nazi Germany (and even more so the Holocaust) go on for such a long time.

So is limiting free speech really the solution? I think we're setting a dangerous precedent.

[pluma]

The status quo is that we're not Nazi Germany. The status quo is therefore that we're at the risk of becoming Nazi Germany.

This is the case in modern Germany as much as it is the case in the US or the UK.

The German answer to that is to look at what allowed us to become Nazi Germany last time and to avoid that.

Some of the resulting limitations are questionable (e.g. the parliamentary 5% hurdle), some are not (e.g. treating incitement of violence and racial hatred as a crime).

If you rally a crowd, step on a podium and tell them to "gas the Jews" or "kill all white men" or "hunt down and murder Edward Snowden", you're facing jail time. Because you're intentionally motivating people to commit serious crimes. Whether you're Joe Blow or a major politician.

FWIW I do disagree that censorship is the wrong solution although many politicians in Germany demand it because it's an easy win. Deleting incitement may stop the hatred from spreading but it doesn't address the cause. Even worse: it hides a crime and interferes with criminal investigations.

Social media companies' response to meeting the legal demands in Germany is to either block content preemptively or to basically give you a button that lets you opt into not seeing it. That doesn't follow the spirit of the law, let alone the letter of it.

[dmichulke]

I mostly agree with your points and just want to note a few things:

> The status quo is that we're not Nazi Germany. The status quo is therefore that we're at the risk of becoming Nazi Germany.

This is not a binary thing, in a democracy there will always be a number of people who think the state is insert arbitrary negative adjective here

So there will always be people who feel threatened (if only in some aspects) by the state, no matter if it's Nazi. And these people want to protect their rights such as free speech, and IMO rightly so. So avoiding becoming Nazi Germany is not enough, you need to avoid even aspects of it such as wars on foreign soil or surveillance of civilian communication, both of which are present today and were in the 1940s.

Limiting free speech is just another aspect that adds to the list of becoming Nazi, hence my 'no'.

> If you rally a crowd, step on a podium and tell them to "gas the Jews" or "kill all white men" or "hunt down and murder Edward Snowden", you're facing jail time.

IANAL but I think this is covered by penal code already [1]. Now hate speech is bad but it'll only convince the ones who are already "close to being convinced". That probably doesn't include you and me, and I personally prefer to know who are the idiots around than to have them shut up and only later realize who they are when they commit an actual crime.

As a side note, it matters even today whether you're a politician (if only in the US) [2]

[1] https://dejure.org/gesetze/StGB/241.html [2] https://mobile.twitter.com/wikileaks/status/7829062249374105...