Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by adrianN 1835 days ago
I'm fairly sure that at any point in history there was a fairly large set of controversial opinions, voicing of which could cause you trouble. Number of opinions you could voice that would get you in very serious trouble is fairly low right now in Germany.
2 comments
rijoja 1834 days ago
Obviously the magnitude of the trouble you would get in differs. However if you are not careful you still will get into trouble. It is as if you read in a lot of opinions in my statement that simply isn't there.
link
MikeUt 1835 days ago
"Number of opinions" is a bad metric. Suppose that number is as low as 1: you can't express the opinion that Uyghurs are being genocided.

Would you call this nearly-perfect free-speech?

link
adrianN 1835 days ago
I think it's really hard to come up with a good metric for freedom of speech with the amount of effort you usually put into online comments. But I bet there are NGOs with various opinions on the topic that rate countries. For example Germany is #13/180 in the Reporters Without Borders ranking of freedom of press https://rsf.org/en/ranking_table, which probably correlates well with garden variety definitions of freedom of speech.
link
Draken93 1835 days ago
Yes and the reason why we aren't ranked higher is that the press was not properly protected by police at right wing and anti-corona-measure protests.

We were ranked at place 11 but were downranked cause of continous attacks on journalists.[1] But the people wo did this are those who cry loudly: "We have no freedom of speech". I even read in this thread "Germany is a totalitarian dystopia with no free speech"

Those people are so far away from reality. I am concerned they might never find back.

[1] https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/panorama/pressefr...

link
MikeUt 1835 days ago
"Germany's Network Enforcement Law, or NetzDG … requires social media companies to block or remove content that violates one of twenty restrictions on hate and defamatory speech in the German Criminal Code," Diana Lee wrote for Yale Law School's Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic. "In effect, the NetzDG conscripts social media companies into governmental service as content regulators," with millions of euros in fines hanging over their heads if they guess wrong. - https://reason.com/2020/10/12/german-style-internet-censorsh...

Germany Raids Homes of 36 People Accused of Hateful Postings Over Social Media - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/20/world/europe/germany-36-a... (a few of the arrests were for threats and coercion, I'm sure you'll prefer to focus on those)

link