| I'm not reading all that, can you please post this in a meme format and then we can judge it based on whether or not you get swatted by the police. JK. Your comment is just mental gymnastics to justify how existing German laws are somehow not a threat to free speech even though the end results and actions of the state and abuses prove that they are. Let me quote German law on the matter: "Freedom of speech is granted by Art. 5 Section 1 GG. It mainly protects opinions but also facts relevant to forming opinions, unless those facts are proven false or intentionally false. Freedom of Speech can be infringed acording to Art. 5 Section 2 GG for protection of ones honor, visible in Section 185 and Section 188 german penal code, that punishes insulting. When free speech and protection of ones honor collide, the court has to weigh, which in a specific case is more important." TL;DR: no matter how much copium you sniff, you actually don't have freedom of speech in Germany. So in Germany your speech is not protected from the government anymore and is entirely subject to opinion of judges and the public. To some extent Germans do not even have freedom of expression because the guilt culture makes people default to calling illegal migration critics Nazis so nobody speaks publicly about this. I'm your east side neighbour, not an American. Our speech here has much better protection, you'll only get in trouble if you make threats or call for violence (as it should be), not for calling politicians "a willie" or "an old woman", because we remember our oppressive communist past and worked to not repeat that level of government censorship, while Germans tried so hard to "not be Nazis" that they put their heads so far up their own ass that they turned back into the same Nazis they say they're fighting. Crazy shit really. |
Of course it was still a scandal, but it is not like anyone had to pay a fine over it or went to prison.
Yes, there are limits to free speech in Germany, when it encroaches on other people's freedom of speech. But that doesn't mean there is no free speech and the examples you pick are mostly cases where someone tried to use those rules against free speech and failed. So they actually show the opposite, you can't just sue someone for their opinion. Only if their opinion encroaches on other people's freedom. I don't think I am the one doing mental gymnastics here. Yes, insults generally don't fall under free speech in Germany and neither does inciting violence, but I simply don't see that as a problem, since you can express opinions also without including direct insults. So from my perspective I can only see you arguing, that insulting other people should be protected by free speech, which we can disagree on, but is a very small aspect of free speech from my perspective and imo even one that harms free speech in the long run.
Here is another example, where the police overreached and was called back: https://netzpolitik.org/2025/kunstfreiheit-berliner-polizei-.... But I don't think the police ignoring the law is a problem with the law, it is a problem with the police.