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No, you do not have as much freedom of speech in the UK or Germany. If you tweet something offensive about e.g. Muslims, or anything else that the police deem to be "hate speech", you will be arrested. And British police have in fact been aggressively enforcing this. In Germany, the restrictions are even more severe. Both German and British governments claim and exercise the power to scrub the internet of extremism, to "protect" citizens from certain viewpoints. You misunderstand the nature of the Bill of Rights and freedom of speech in the United States. The Bill of Rights are in the federal constitution and are enforceable in the federal courts, against any level of government (federal, state, or local).[1] One of the central free speech doctrines in the United States is the prohibition on viewpoint discrimination. That means that our laws cannot treat any viewpoint differently than any other. If you are allowed to stand in front of the courthouse and scream anti-racist slogans, then you must be allowed to stand in front of the courthouse and spew all the racist hatred that your heart desires. Communists, fascists, anarchists, democrats, republicans, racists, reverse-racists, white supremacists, black supremacists, holocaust deniers, and even people calling for the overthrow of the US government, they can all speak their minds in America. There is no jurisdiction in the world that guarantees free speech as totally and absolutely as the United States does. Americans are self-governing people. We don't need someone to tell us what we're allowed to think. [1] This wasn't always the case, but the Supreme Court has held since the 1920s that the 14th Amendment "incorporated" the Bill of Rights to the states. Before this, most or all states had free speech provisions in their own constitutions anyway, but enforcement was not uniform. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R... |