We have deep respect for German and other languages, but HN is an English-language site, so posts here need to be in English.
That may require waiting until a good English-language article appears, but the more significant the topic is, the more (and sooner) this is likely to happen.
Incidentally the German company DeepL is not only widely known for offering the best machine translation quality, but they also offer a plugin to translate websites:
This is clearly a bait and switch. If illegal actions are being perpetrated (e.g., death threats) then prosecute them. What this is all about is incremental conditioning towards normalizing censorship for "local law" violations … the same kinds of wanton "laws" conjured up by all the dictatorial regimes that all the western societies are quickly drifting towards.
The German government has even tried attacking Gab, and regardless of what you may think of Gab, it is not a good thing if you do not want to find yourself one day having overslept living in a totalitarian regime. Just consider the implications of a foreign government taking action against a US website, wholly based in the USA, because it does not like things on the website that are no only legal in the USA, protected by the fundamental rights and laws of the land (Constitution), and are in line with all principles of human rights.
It would be evil and unethical for the USA to, e.g., use the US government to attack a French website for disparaging things about the USA or even just negatively discussing actions and behaviors of Americans, just as much as it would be evil for anyone else to do that.
We are entering a really dangerous situation where people are sleepwalking into supporting authoritarianisms, simply because they are conditioned to think they are part of the in-group. But that never lasts once the trap doors are slammed shut.
You either support freedom, free speech, and human rights or you don't; there is no freedom and human rights light.
>This is clearly a bait and switch. If illegal actions are being perpetrated (e.g., death threats) then prosecute them.
They are. The operators of the channel have an open arrest warrant for inciting hatred, denying the holocaust and death threats against public and private persons.
> wholly based in the USA because it does not like things on the website that are no only legal in the USA, protected by the fundamental rights and laws of the land, and are in line with all principles of human rights.
That changes when the "wholly USA" website is being used by German citizens, who are under jurisdiction.
>It would be evil and unethical for the USA to, e.g., use the US government to attack a French website for disparaging things about the USA
I's not about "disparaging things about the <country>", it's about running a website or service and not reacting to the fact that actual nazis are using the service. (You know with the eugenics and everything!)
If you think stopping nazis is authoritarianism, then you'd be the same kind of person that lets authoritarianism bootstamp all over them in the name of freedom. (Paradox of Tolerance)
> That changes when the "wholly USA" website is being used by German citizens, who are under jurisdiction.
Then block the website in your country. If I have no physical, legal, or economic presence in your country, I shouldn't expect to have to follow your laws. Do I need to start enforcing Thai lèse majesté laws too, now?
Well you don't. Telegram blocked the channel in germany. So I don't get what your anger is all about then. Telegram Operators were given the choice of leaving germany entirely and blocking users there, be blocked by germany or remove the channel. They choose their favorite option.
Germany forced Project Gutenberg to block them for a time as well.
This should not be the responsibility of the website owner to comply with the laws of a country they don't have a presence in, presumably under threat of either extradition or arrest if they one day happen to enter the borders of the country.
If the website doesn't comply with the laws of the country, that country should block it, and that should be the extent to the action they can reasonably take. Unless you think Belarus should be able to arrest somebody passing through their airspace because, say, some other individual made a comment critical of Lukashenko on their blog?
So you also think that website owners should not be allowed to block content if they think a particular country is worth their business? Because that is what is actually happening, not made up fantasies about "forcing them". Either you block or they block, and it's not a crime for one side to do it first (what should I bet that if Germany blocked Telegram it would be a similar outrage in the comment section???)
Liking it or not you do have legal or economic presence when you accept people in Germany to visit your site (e.g at first more than a few American websites simply blocked all EU traffic after GDPR was approved), and if you keep violating the local law after being requested to cooperate, they will fine, emit arrest requests and sure enough if deemed necessary also block your website temporarily/permanently, in other words they will do what they would do in any other case even if the full application of the law is less effective because you are not physically there (or have any interest to be) to personally see a big difference in your quality of life.
Then block the website. It's not my responsibility to bring my website into compliance with the laws of all 200 countries in the world and the laws of the jurisdictions within them. Because of VPNs, it's impossible to tell which users belong to which countries (and even without it, geo IP isn't that reliable).
> e.g at first more than a few American websites simply blocked all EU traffic after GDPR was approved
Those websites have parent companies who have an economic presence in the EU.
Or they didn't have a parent company with even more economic presence than just them (serving American-centric news with ads), but they would like to have that path still easily open in the future, after all its a big market and... that's the point. Off course you can literally ignore all legal requests for compliance from all foregein countries until they do the worst that they can legally do to you which isn't much if you truly have no particularly strong personal or business related interest in them (lose users that you didn't care to have in the first place, cut a travel destination off your list because if you show up you can be held in prison for not paying a fine... Or whatever), but telegram is not you and apparently they care about being able to continue do business there (allowing people in Germany to use the chat app), so not complying is not a option.
It seems to me there are three possible ways law on the internet can work, to include ill-defined hybrids between them. Please let me know if I've missed any:
1. The law where a service is hosted applies. Entities in other legal jurisdictions may not be allowed to do business with the service (e.g. run ads on it) if it doesn't follow the law where they're located. Cost: people may be able to access content that's illegal where they live.
2. The law where the user is located applies. Anyone putting up a website must familiarize themselves with the laws of 195 countries where users could be and comply with all of them, or at least the ones that have a friendly relationship to the host's country. Service operators must block users from jurisdictions with laws they can't obey. Cost: this is a nightmarish compliance landscape only large companies can deal with; the internet becomes much less global.
3. Countries put up a Great Firewall of X. Cost: the hacker community has traditionally considered censorship bad; the internet becomes much less global.
If you do business in a country, laws of that country apply to you. Selling apps in that country would count I presume. Part of the threat from the german government was to have GPlay and Apple delete the app from german storefronts.
In the case of Telegram, no selling takes place; the app is free.
I can get the Android version from Google's store, which is uncontroversially subject to German law because Google has physical offices and a financial presence in Germany. I can also download it from telegram.org, which to my knowledge does not have a physical or financial presence in Germany.
Germany probably has the legal authority to order Google to stop distributing the Telegram app and can use that authority to pressure Telegram. What remains unresolved is the degree to which Germany can act against Telegram directly.
Well, it seems very much like Telegram wants to continue being on the German Play Store. And yes, Telegram is very much selling things, even if the price, at the moment is 0$. They're also going into the ad business, if you check their business web presence.
The German government has a broader view than just this. See the Project Gutenberg case. PGLAF has zero presence in Germany, yet the German government claimed jurisdiction simply because the website had German-language content.
1) If the site is run as a tor endpoint, and says "no German users allowed", I wonder how the jurisdiction thing plays out. (Yes, I'm asking HN for legal advice!)
2) The US recently had Mein Kampf toting neo-nazis working in the white house (Trump's PR team didn't even bother hiding this, and publicly praise Hitler's propaganda machine.)
So, the US is pretty far down the Paradox of Tolerance rathole. At some point we'll need to flip the "Nazis must die!" bit like we did in WWII, unless the GOP corrects it's own course.
Apparently Pence publicly disagreed with our deposed dictator about the VP's ability to unilaterally overthrow elections. Trump didn't resort to name calling like he usually does. (Over 70% of Trump voters and 75% of Americans agree with Pence on this, for what it's worth.)
Maybe there's still reason to hope the US isn't headed to some sort of Apartheid-style "democracy", where idiots run everything and just ignore election results. Maybe?
>1) If the site is run as a tor endpoint, and says "no German users allowed", I wonder how the jurisdiction thing plays out. (Yes, I'm asking HN for legal advice!)
Ask your lawyer. Not any lawyer but yours. Anyone else answering is likely to give you bad answers, especially on HN.
> That changes when the "wholly USA" website is being used by German citizens, who are under jurisdiction.
Then Germans will have to prosecute those going to the website and using it or remove it from German DNS servers. Germany has no right to try and limit the rights of US citizens by extension of limiting those of Germans.
> I's not about "disparaging things about the <country>", it's about running a website or service and not reacting to the fact that actual nazis are using the service. (You know with the eugenics and everything!)
As much as I hate the Nazis, Nazi sentiment is not illegal in the USA as long as they stay within the law. The German government has no right to push their ideology and laws here. Again block Germans from the site or sue to have Parler block German user IP addresses (good luck with that, it won't last 5 minutes before the judge laughs and says "next case")
>Then Germans will have to prosecute those going to the website and using it or remove it from German DNS servers. Germany has no right to try and limit the rights of US citizens by extension of limiting those of Germans.
And? That's exactly what happened. The Telegram Operators were given a choice and they picked. If a US operator is given the same choice, they can pick no business with German users or remove the content the germans don't like. If they pick the later, you have no business to complain about that, really, since it doesn't affect you as US citizen.
>As much as I hate the Nazis, Nazi sentiment is not illegal in the USA as long as they stay within the law. The German government has no right to push their ideology and laws here. Again block Germans from the site or sue to have Parler block German user IP addresses (good luck with that, it won't last 5 minutes before the judge laughs and says "next case")
Nazis have no right to push their ideology here. Nor should they have anywhere. "They ought to be hammered back into the holes they crawled out of" to cite a recently popular music single in germany. All their ideology leads to is authoritarianism, oppression, violence and war.
I'm not sure if you're a US citizen or not but if you are then you know regardless of your opinion then there is nothing you can do about Naziism as long as they stay within parameters of the law. From a legal standpoint you're wrong, they absolutely can and do operate in the USA up and until the point they break the law. That's why there is a 1st amendment to protect our opinions from government intervention as long as it falls under protected speech. You can preach all the naziism that you want but the first time you attack someone because of the hate filled racism that it inspires or you collude to overthrow the government, then you're going to jail.
I think the USA Standpoint on allowing Nazis is wrong. Plain and simple. It should be illegal to have publicly expressed opinions like "the holocaust never happened" and "jews ought to be exterminated".
I would also point out that Nazis didn't "collude to overthrow the government" until they were well in control of the police, the courts and the military. So don't think your 1st amendment rights or any rights protect you from them.
Don't underestimate the inflexibility of German society. It is very conservative while believing itself not to be.
The laws against insults stem from a feudal honor system, it is not about dignity. Dignity != Honor. One is intrinsic, one is extrinsic. Of course there is a red line where an insult becomes defamation, but German law is quite old and laws are very slowly deprecated. There are still articles against blasphemy for example.
Common law countries are the much more advanced societies in this regard. But even discussing this in Germany is next to impossible. I would not recommend to even think about compromising with any demands out of Germany on this topic. The privacy approach is better, but the condemnation of "hate speech" only helped dictators around the world.
The article is written in German, but with a Google Translate you can understand the just of it. Apparently Telegram added a new blocking system based on phone numbers, sorta a geo-blocking thing, and people with German phone numbers registered on their Telegram accounts aren't able to access those blocked channels.
Also, unlike the previous block this one applies even to the users who are using the app downloaded directly from Telegram site and not the iOS/Google Play version.
The blocking happens after German minister of interior had a meeting with Telegram directors a few days ago.
Probably makes sense. I'm not super familiar with Telegram, but to know a channel is doing stuff that's against German law probably means that someone with access to the channel reported it to authorities.
Germany is also one of those countries that blanket bans particular groups/parties in general, which the US didn't really do until after 9/11. Banning a group chat isn't much different.
> Probably makes sense. I'm not super familiar with Telegram, but to know a channel is doing stuff that's against German law probably means that someone with access to the channel reported it to authorities.
Avocadolf's channels are public, you could access them on the Telegram web UI even without an account. The German government has tried to get the channel shut down for months now, after Hildmann fled the country and engaged in Holocaust denial (which is a crime here).
The problem is that unlike all other major social networks, Telegram refuses to comply with German laws (in particular the NetzDG) and has refused to name a contact person for the authorities so that egregious violations could be stopped. I read an article that claimed the only form of contact between German authorities and Telegram used to be a bilateral anti-terror coordination with the US FBI, which makes sense given the common problem of radical Islamist terrorism.
The challenge with Telegram is that it has server costs, but it has no income cash flow. They're experimenting. But overall its 100% investment money. And so if they cannot be tried criminally, there's no business loss if they can't take German cash. This is obviously an issue with Facebook who cares about cash quite a bit, or Reddit, or whatever. But not Telegram.
So yeah.
My guess is that at this point Germany is saying that this could fall into the criminal side of things, at which point Telegram would care.
> My guess is that at this point Germany is saying that this could fall into the criminal side of things, at which point Telegram would care.
Not sure where telegram is registered, but can a foreign company have a criminal responsiblity by just being accessible in that country? I'm sure most of the internet violates some kind of ancient anti-something law, be it nudity or whatever, but noone really cares if boobs are illegal in afghanistan, why care if something is illegal in germany, if you're an (eg.) british company?
I need a huge fact-check on this, but I seem to remember that while the "no cash flow" statement is trivially true, in practice isn't the investment capital already enough to cover several decades of funding?
If you want to do business in a country you usually have to follow the laws of the country. If you are not following these laws and you get booted out of their respective markets you can't cry censorship it's that easy.
You can definitely cry censorship. Having a government process of censorship doesn't mean you can insist it's not censorship. Plenty of government groups responsible for censoring have the word "censor" in the name.
Except Telegram does not do business in Germany. Even if Germany gets Telegram kicked off the German App Store, they have no way to block Telegram's web servers, which do not need to comply with Germany's jurisdiction.
If they don't go down the route of implementing a state-level firewall such as China is doing, they're fighting a losing battle. And frankly, if Telegram were inaccessible from Germany, the same people would simply use the next messaging app. There's nothing groundbreaking within Telegram that cannot be replicated.
IMHO, this is the government embarrassing themselves with the fact that they've lost the goodwill of a huge chunk of the population and trying to blame Telegram for it - as if the mindset and communication of those unsatisfied people would simply change/disappear if they were no longer able to access Telegram. Which furthermore shows that today's governments still do not understand the internet.
It doesn't seem like Telegram is actually doing business in Germany. I feel like simply having German citizens using your app doesn't mean that the nation state of Germany has the same authority over your business as if you were actually registered as a GmbH in their territory.
Sure you can, and it is censorship if a country is banning your platform for not censoring public discourse. That is exactly what is happening here. It would be like liberals in the US blocking Telegram nationwide for allowing anti-mandate discussion and then saying the reason has not nothing to do with censorship.
> Germany is also one of those countries that blanket bans particular groups/parties in general
You make it sound like Germany is constantly banning political parties. There have been exactly two bans of political parties in the post-war history of Germany: A nazi party in 1952 and a communist party in 1956. Also don't forget who occupied Germany in this decade and made a lot of its decisions.
But there are many banned named groups. Germany is not unique in this. That's a thing foreign to the US that Americans may not understand, which is why I mentioned it. I can start a group called the "Destroy The Government Now Neo-Nazis" in the US with no fear that it will ever be banned.
Well telegram has to abide by German law, otherwise authorities will seize all their assets in Germany (and maybe even Europe?) and shut them down and sue them international court for ignoring the will of a Nation. I don't think Telegram had much choice in the matter. Thanks for the summary.
It gets used. Because this secret chat does not save its history, it leaves no trace on the devive. So people who want to cheat on their partner, but know that their partner checks their mobile at times even installed telegram because of this feature (and they do not know what e2e means).
Surprisingly many people have this motivation. So many, that I know of persons who got problems with installing telegram, because their partner assumed - it was for this reason.
> I don’t quite understand what the point of telegram is then?
It's UX is far superior to any cross-platform competitor. On top of that, its client is open source and the servers have easy and free bot APIs. It also has channels, which broadcast your messages to followers and many secure competitors don't have such functionality.
It's not encrypted, but as it turns out most people don't really care about that in practice. If they would, texting wouldn't be popular in places like the USA. That's probably why people go to Telegram instead of Signal, ease of use is more important than privacy for most, especially in group chats that are generally about what's for dinner.
As far as I understand: many people use Telegram channels as a sort of Twitter-like social media, since you can set the channel to publicly available and anyone with app can read what you wrote, and even interact with you through, like voting through giving your post an emoji or commenting on it (if you enabled comments).
Channels are extremely public, in the sense that you can access them even without installing telegram [1] and there are websites which can generate RSS feeds for all the posts of a channel or things like that [2]. So this is not exactly a private conversation we're talking about, more like the printing of broadsheets to be nailed to every other house's wall.
At the moment, ads are only displayed in public channels with at least 1.000 users, so they are still pretty rare to come by (like, I use Telegram regularly and only see them every other day). Plus, I've heard that some clients aren't supporting them yet (even if Telegram's stance is that every client should), so maybe you'll never see them.
Avoid censorship with this one weird trick: Print the information in a book, and put it in a library, or even on a school curriculum, if you can. If anyone tries to remove the book, then we are back to the dark ages of book banning or even burning. You know who else burned books, right?
On the other hand, if the book is prevented from being published or stocked in the first place, if school or public libraries simply refuse to carry it, teachers don't assign it, or if the information is not in book form, nobody cares.
If you're referring to the recent books like Maus being removed from the school curriculum in America, they were banned for things like containing nudity and rude words. From what I can tell from the auto-translated version of the article, these Telegram posts were removed in Germany for breaking German law. Whether you think the German law is correct is a different issue.
I'm referring to the many books that never make it near a school, sparing their opponents from having to reckon with their own censorious, book-burning natures.
Germany bans things like Holocaust denial and certain things about far right political parties. It’s not the American way but I’m quite ok with Germany doing this.
As I understand it, writing/distributing child porn fiction in the US is against the law. Conceptually, that's the same thing; expressing ideas that cause no _direct_ harm to anyone.
> Germany has literally criminalised thinking the wrong things, and denies people to associate freely based on the things that they happen to think.
Yeah, like "all jews should be killed". Good thing.
> It doesn't stop those people thinking those things and it doesn't stop people from associating with each other.
It prevents such things from being normalized and makes it harder for them to be put in action.
Yeah, I know what you learned in school that this is worse than actual mass murder, and that everyone should be allowed to advocate for mass murder so that they can be disputed in the "marketplace of ideas".
In reality, what you get is echo chambers that lead people to believe that they're part of a majority who thinks that mass murder (of the right groups, of course) is good, and then some of them start to think that it's up to them to just go and do it.
In reality, criminalizing thinking certain clearly defined wrong things protects the freedom of everyone.
> Yeah, like "all jews should be killed". Good thing.
Do you think it stops them from thinking that? Because you made is illegal.
It doesn't.
> It prevents such things from being normalized and makes it harder for them to be put in action.
This gets trotted out all the time and it is nothing but a sound bite. I haven't met anyone hear about an atrocity and genuinely say it was a good thing.
> Yeah, I know what you learned in school that this is worse than actual mass murder, and that everyone should be allowed to advocate for mass murder so that they can be disputed in the "marketplace of ideas".
No I didn't learn this in school. I have no memory of this ever being discussed at school.
I read lots of books about things like maintaining political power, how the state works and economics and I came to this conclusion myself.
> In reality, what you get is echo chambers that lead people to believe that they're part of a majority who thinks that mass murder (of the right groups, of course) is good, and then some of them start to think that it's up to them to just go and do it.
That doesn't happen. In fact the opposite happens. If you stop people from talking freely what happens is that they will only talk with people that they believe to be on their side.
> In reality, criminalizing thinking certain clearly defined wrong things protects the freedom of everyone.
It literally doesn't. Because it allows other less odious things to be criminalised when it is criminally expedient. That is because the precedent has been set.
> Do you think it stops them from thinking that? Because you made is illegal.
No, it does not stop people from thinking that (and of course that is not what is made illegal). It stops them from publishing and spreading those thoughts, because that is what is actually made illegal.
> This gets trotted out all the time and it is nothing but a sound bite.
So you don't actually have an argument against it?
> I haven't met anyone hear about an atrocity and genuinely say it was a good thing.
Then be happy that you haven't met such people. They most definitely exist:
It's ok because the thoughts they ban are not novel, they had their time and were thoroughly executed on.
You'll have hard time convincing anyone that thought "Jews are inferior race and should be exterminated" should have the same right to be considered as any other. When we already thought this thought extensively and even based our actions on it and it led only to unprecedented nhuman suffering.
> It's ok because the thoughts they ban are not novel, they had their time and were thoroughly executed on.
"Because it is not new it is okay". Sorry that isn't very convincing.
The issue is that if you ban one set of ideas you have set a precedent to ban other ideas that aren't as odious.
Using the same justification you can criminalise believing in the Earth is flat or any other fringe idea.
> You'll have hard time convincing anyone that thought "Jews are inferior race and should be exterminated" should have the same right to be considered as any other. When we already thought this thought extensively and even based our actions on it and it led only to unprecedented nhuman suffering.
I am not saying they should be considered equally. I am not saying that those ideas are equal. I am saying that someone shouldn't be criminalised for thinking or expressing such ideas.
Do you really want people to stereotype all Germans as Nazis and Holocaust deniers? Because I'm pretty sure this is what would end up happening if the German government did not go to the trouble of explicitly banning these things, regardless of how few people actually advocated them. It's practically a free boost in optics and national pride that benefits pretty much all Germans at basically zero cost, because it's only banning the most obscenely offensive and pointless idiocy. (Yes, Holocaust denial is idiotic - the evidence of it in German archives and elsewhere is utterly overwhelming. The remaining question wrt. history is whether Hitler and the Nazis actually planned even worse genocides than what they ended up doing, and the most likely answer is yes, they absolutely did.)
> Do you really want people to stereotype all Germans as Nazis and Holocaust deniers? Because I'm pretty sure this is what would end up happening if the German government did not go to the trouble of explicitly banning these things, regardless of how few people actually advocated them.
No it wouldn't. This is a ridiculous argument.
> It's basically a free boost in optics and national pride that benefits practically all Germans at basically zero cost, because it's only banning the most obscenely offensive and pointless idiocy.
The cost is individual liberty. Which BTW if you haven't been paying attention has been eroded severely all over the globe in almost every western country over the last two years. So no it is not zero cost.
What about the average German's liberty of not having his country publicly badmouthed due to the actions of a few crazy nutcases? It's hard to seriously argue that this wouldn't happen, given Germany's post-WWII history. (Also I'm not sure why you're bringing up the 'last two years', the prohibition has been in place for far longer than that.)
Do you live in a country that allows ISIS to communicate freely and openly?
I live in the US, I know infinitely more people that have been hurt by rogue showerheads than ISIS, yet even publicly saying that you support them and their aims can get you put in prison.
edit: "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" was a reason given for jailing US socialists who were protesting against the WWI draft.
Of course. Only mentioning it because the only explanation of the limits of free speech that an American can quote was formulated to keep peaceniks from passing out flyers.
Because Germany is a representative democracy where you cannot change the minds of a few elected leaders for at least 3 more years, once elected.
Also, Germans aren't really the kind of people to protest on the streets. They'd much rather complain and complain and maybe change the position of their cross on the next ballot to a party just a small tip further left or right, only to then start complaining that nothing ever really changes and readjust their cross in the opposite direction in the following election. This cycle repeats since about 70 years.
So yes, if the Germans really did not want this kind of stuff, they would have to drastically change their votes. And bear in mind that the current government, which is the most dramatic change (to the left) in the last 16 years since the Merkel era, has already lost the goodwill according to surveys, with people already again favoring the Merkel party (e. g. said readjustment).
Do the people of your country have great control over what their government does and have the legal right to remove them when they are unhappy? What country is that, i wanna move there :)
Does it matter? No mainstream party is going to legalize the Nazis again. At best they would look like they approve of nazis. Worst outcome is that nazis become political rivals.
I think everyone was fine until some of the people who are against the Covid regulations started with comparing the vaccinations to the holocaust, wearing stars which resembled the "Judenstern" given out by the Nazis with the word "unvaccinated" on them to demontrations and alike.
You can do lots of crazy stuff and talk a lot of shit in Germany, but relavating the holocaust is off-bounds for good reason.
I do not understand this logic. The "Judenstern" predated the Holocaust by a long time, so they are comparing mandatory vaccination to a slippery slope rather than the to end of the slope. The "Judenstern" is how it all started, i.e (in their view), by segregating clean and unclean groups with vaccine checks.
It is insensitive, but by doing it they are clearly anti-Nazi. They are not belittling the Holocaust and they are not comparing vaccine mandates to the Holocaust.
The Judenstern as referenced here is specifically the yellow star jews were forced to wear during and just before WW2. That is how they're entirely styled. The rhetoric that is used by people doing this is very much comparing vaccine mandates to the Nazi regime's crimes.
If German law forbids people from drawing analogies to the Nazis and saying "this is bad, it looks like Nazi-ism and we shouldn't do this" then the law is truly backwards. The whole point of not denying the Holocaust is to learn generalizable lessons from it.
Again, that is not what is happening here. The antivaxxers and covidiots who are running around with the yellow stars are trivializing or denying the holocaust with their actions.
You are allowed to make analogies and say "this looks bad, looks like Nazi-ism". But putting on the yellow star is way and far above and beyond that, it is claiming your situation is as bad as the people in those camps. So unless Antivaxxers/Covidiots are being treated just as badle as people in those campls, it's trivializing the holocaust.
To play devils advocate, both the constitutions of Germany and Japan were written by the United States and the other Allied Powers. We made sure to include restrictions that would otherwise not have had high enough citizen support to make it into an organically drafted constitution.
He sounds like a reasonable person until 2015. I am not a psychiatrist, but this person sounds like they are descending into serious mental illness. How else do you go from a health food public persona... publish multiple cookbooks on the matter, the descend into some kind of 1980s "crazy person" talking about Holocaust denial, COVID-19 conspiracy theories, etc.?
This person needs help from mental health professionals. Plain and simple.
Please do not read this post as someone apologising for anti-semitic comments -- directly or indirectly. No, I reject (200%!) anti-semitic comments from _mentally healthy people_. This person has gone "over the edge"!
Does anyone else feel the same as me? I hope his family can get him help. He should go back to healthy cookbooks and forget about all the crazy conspiracy theories...
Can't read German, but I'm going to assume the channels in question are full of neo-Nazis. If that's the case then this isn't anything particularly new; Germany's constitution explicitly denies freedom of speech to Nazis.
I don't find this particularly objectionable on it's own; Nazis and neo-Nazis never believed in free speech to begin with. However, we should still remain wary of false positives or scope creep beyond this narrow carve-out.
My experience with machine translation is that it's unreliable at best and wholly unfit for purpose at worst. In this case, I'd rather known ignorance over being misled.
They're certainly very adjacent, but the general trend is more into conspiracy theorists / new world order and anti-corona measures with a tendency to call for violence.
"Germany's constitution explicitly denies freedom of speech to Nazis."
Not exactly like this. You are allowed to speak your mind as a Nazi. You may say you are a Nazi and also say why you think they are superior etc. blablabla.
You are not allowed, to wear certain symbols of NS times (swastika and co) and you are not allowed to deny that the holocaust happened and to glorify certain SS organisations.
While it is not the constitution, but the criminal code, being a nazi without at least a basic veil of decency will get you jailed for publicly voicing your beliefs:
Whosoever, in a manner capable of disturbing the public peace:
incites hatred against a national, racial, religious group or a group defined by their ethnic origins, against segments of the population or individuals because of their belonging to one of the aforementioned groups or segments of the population or calls for violent or arbitrary measures against them; or
assaults the human dignity of others by insulting, maliciously maligning an aforementioned group, segments of the population or individuals because of their belonging to one of the aforementioned groups or segments of the population, or defaming segments of the population,
shall be liable to imprisonment from three months to five years.
Well, in theory you can also go to jail, for saying you think the catholic church is a organisation of criminal pedophiles. (blasphemie paragraph)
Does not happen in reality, though.
There are Nazis in jail though for denying the holocaust (Horst Mahler) and for trying to incite violence (Landser). Not for expressing their nazi ideology, but for direct calls for murder.
Plenty of NDP functionaries (and some AfD too) were fined or are on parole for Volksverhetzung. Just because it doesn't usually escalate into jail time doesn't mean the law is not being applied.[1]
"So they do deny freedom of speech and freedom of expression to people that the government doesn't like "
Of course they do, every state on earth limits freedom of speech. In germany regarding certain topics even more so. But nazis are still allowed to express their ideology. This is a difference to a time, when also this was forbidden. (for example in the NS area)
If removing threats of violence is considered censorship, then the word "censorship" has no meaning. Think about it: how does censorship really occur? Do governments cast a magic spell that makes it so that the words can't come out of your mouth? No. They threaten violence[0], in order to punish you for saying the thing you don't want to say, which creates a chilling effect. This is no different than what Nazis do - they threaten violence against people whose speech they don't like.
At that point, the choice is not between "freedom of speech" and "censorship". It's "censor the Nazi" or "let the Nazi censor everyone else". You must choose the option that preserves the most freedom of speech.
And this goes for every other entity that threatens violence - not just Nazis. I'm only mentioning them because we're talking about the German legal conception of freedom of expression. Nobody says "I'm going to kill you" for the sake of it; they say it to terrorize other people into doing things they want, including things like not saying words they don't want spoken. This also goes for threatening violence against groups of people rather than speakers of certain words, and political speech that proposes using the state as a means to do the above. All of that is censorious, and as far as I'm concerned a definition of freedom of speech that does not include freedom from threats of violence is incomplete.
That being said, censorship by terrorism should be construed narrowly. One might have thoughts of, say, radical Islamic terrorism while reading the above paragraph. This would be an example of censorious speech. However, ISIS, Boko Haram, and/or the Taliban making use of censorious threats does not mean that the entire religion of Islam is guilty of the same thing. Same thing for Nazis or neo-Nazis - they don't make Christians or neo-pagans valid targets of censorship just because they happen to belong to the same religion.
[0] Or at least, some long chain of escalating legalistic rituals that we call a lawsuit, which is backed by the government's monopoly over violence within an area. This is a distinction without a difference.
> If removing threats of violence is considered censorship, then the word "censorship" has no meaning. Think about it: how does censorship really occur? Do governments cast a magic spell that makes it so that the words can't come out of your mouth? No. They threaten violence[0], in order to punish you for saying the thing you don't want to say, which creates a chilling effect. This is no different than what Nazis do - they threaten violence against people whose speech they don't like.
Denying the holocaust didn't happen isn't a threat of violence. It is saying that something didn't happen.
Also a threat of violence has to be credible.
> At that point, the choice is not between "freedom of speech" and "censorship". It's "censor the Nazi" or "let the Nazi censor everyone else". You must choose the option that preserves the most freedom of speech.
This is a false dichotomy.
> And this goes for every other entity that threatens violence - not just Nazis. I'm only mentioning them because we're talking about the German legal conception of freedom of expression. Nobody says "I'm going to kill you" for the sake of it; they say it to terrorize other people into doing things they want, including things like not saying words they don't want spoken. This also goes for threatening violence against groups of people rather than speakers of certain words, and political speech that proposes using the state as a means to do the above. All of that is censorious, and as far as I'm concerned a definition of freedom of speech that does not include freedom from threats of violence is incomplete.
Your conception of freedom of speech isn't freedom of speech. It is "freedom to hear things that aren't too unpleasant".
As for the the chilling effect might work with some people. It won't work with others. With me it wouldn't work. I would tell them to "fuck around and find out". I won't live in fear.
Although your statement is alright, the big thing here isn't nazis' free speech in particular, but censorship on a platform that is being sold as a privacy saver.
Local laws may change from place to place. What is maybe reasonable in place A (and we may both agree with) may not be reasonable in place B
It's an unholy mixture. It started with critique against the restrictions due to Covid 19, but it escalated from that point on. Comparison of unvaccinated people and jews under the Nazi regime are what's happening in some of those Telegram channels these days and that's against german law, yes.
Many of the Telegram channels of the covid-deniers actually escalated to open calls for murder, not just antisemitic comparisons (which are bad enough on themselves).
The article also notes: The channels are only blocked, if you have a German phone number. If you have an Austrian phone number you can still read them.
If they are holocaust deniers, As much as I love free speech, I can understand where the german government is coming from. we can't allow THAT to ever happen again.
This will probably get flagged or downvoted to oblivion but meanwhile, no one bats an eye at the worldwide brushing under the rug of the Palestinian Apartheid.
Telegram was lauded by our (Germany's) public broadcasting channels as an important tool for protesters to organize against the current regime in Belarus. They apparently do not like when it happens at home too.
Exactly. A superior option for all the terrorists, extremists and hitmen which many of them are all signing up to and socialising on.
Given that MobileCoin is a new way for them to fund their operations without a trace, it's sound very attractive for these extremists to stay underground without exposing themselves due to Signal's E2EE than Telegram. Also, no censorship on Signal, so it is a free for all without the consequences.
Best part is, MobileCoin is just about to be a great pump and dump ponzi once they officially launch on Signal. Great value proposition for criminals and speculators.
Not in a way that achieves the same purpose as Telegram. Telegram is like Twitter, which is well suited for interaction with people you don't know. No wasted effort on security since everyone is speaking in public anyway.
Signal groups are poor at that. The work required to encrypt messages increases with group members. People don't want to show their phone numbers in large public groups, and Signal also lacks the group admin/moderation options necessary to handle many hundreds or thousands of members.
Signal has groups, telegram has groups and channels.
Signal has normal groups like WhatsApp, where you configure the settings so that only admins can send messages, then it might slightly become like telegram channels.
Telegram is probably the only tech in world, which has this unique mechanism of communicating. Cloud backup, groups/channels, anonymous usernames, e2e encryption feature (1 to 1, not by default), censorship resistance more than other messaging/social media companies, all bundled together.
Hmm, but if your app was decentralized, they could still remove it from the app stores? Which would effectively prevent 95% of people from using it, probably.
No, decentralized distribution is achieved for example when you have widgets hosted on many sites, which all have https so you're not sure what they're hosting for private visitors unless you create an account.
It's hard to ban all those sites. Telegram actually has such widgets, but they prefer to rely on everyone downloading their main app. Moxie also complains that decentralized stuff is slow to change.
That may require waiting until a good English-language article appears, but the more significant the topic is, the more (and sooner) this is likely to happen.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...