[pembrook]

Hrmmm, German supports using the monopoly on violence given to the state to make raids on people who make undesirable social media posts.

There’s only one problem. Whos to say you won’t be the next target if the political climate shifts to cracking down on pro-censorship voices like yourself?

Will you think its still a good use of your tax money when the opposition is putting you in a police car for this exact HN comment?

[aleph_minus_one]

> Hrmmm, German supports using the monopoly on violence given to the state to make raids on people who make undesirable social media posts.

The German society is insanely divided on a lot of (in this case: political) topics. Better avoid making such generalizations.

[alexey-salmin]

In my reading he meant the author of the parent comment specifically, hence "German supports" and not "Germans support". So not a generalization.

[sho_hn]

> German supports using the monopoly on violence given to the state to make raids on people who make undesirable social media posts.

Yes. As a sibling poster mentioned, this has historical roots. German law recognizes something called "Volksverhetzung", similar to concepts in other national criminal codes in other countries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksverhetzung

You can probably guess which hot button issue it comes up with in context the most often (if not: Holocaust denial).

Essentially, there was a landmark judgement that certain forms of calling for violence against women publicly can qualify as this, and so may potentially be criminal (this would be decided case by case in an actual trial, of course).

I can completely understand coming from the perspective of the First Amendment US system and having a different opinion on this. As a crude analogy, it's a bit like Americans love their free market while Europeans usually think a bit more regulation of capitalism is a sane thing to do. It's going to be difficult to agree across the pond.

These things exist on a gradient. Note that plenty of other intact democracies are much stricter than Germany, e.g. South Korea where legal action against online hate speech occurs at a far larger volume, and comes together with far more tracking infrastructure and lack of anonymity on the internet (e.g. since everyone has a client cert for online commerce). And you know what? Many South Koreans want internet hate speech and trolling and bullying policed even much harder.

In Germany there is constant, sometimes quite heated debate on the reach of the application of the Volksverhetzung idea. I think that's very good and have had different opinions across various cases.

> Will you think its still a good use of your tax money when the opposition is putting you in a police car for this exact HN comment?

I know the legislative and political processes of my country well enough to know the long process it would take to get there. If I see things slide in the wrong direction, you bet I'll vote or take to the streets on that issue, too.

A country is a process that takes active participation. It's not a black or white thing you settle one time.

[alexey-salmin]

What's you position on criminal prosecution and house searches for insults of politicians?

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/08/05/german-politic...

> The offence means that in certain cases, criticism of the government that constitutes insult or defamation against political figures is subject to criminal prosecution in Germany.

> Specifically, Section 188 was amended by law, adding "insult" to the offence in addition to "defamation" and "slander". The offence was also extended to include local politicians.

> Robert Habeck of the Greens, for example, filed 805 criminal complaints. The Greens' Annalena Baerbock filed 513, Marco Buschmann of the FDP 26, and Boris Pistorius of the SPD 10, among others.

> Politicians from other parties such as the CDU and AfD have also filed criminal complaints against insults from citizens.

> This includes AfD leader Alice Weidel, who has filed hundreds of complaints for insults online and has also made use of Section 188, even though her party is in favour of abolishing it.

> CDU leader Friedrich Merz, before he became chancellor, had also filed several criminal complaints for insulting behaviour, which in some cases led to house searches.

[sho_hn]

I think the insult prosecution goes in most cases too far. For me the difference is that Volksverhetzung targets entire groups and raises sentiment against them, while these insults are individual, and public persons are already special-cased in some other ways. I also think the people pressing charges are usually doing themselves no favors, when this is covered in the press they usually end up looking like power-abusing bullies.

[alexey-salmin]

Do you mean that the law is OK, just the prosecution somehow goes too far? Or the law itself allowing prosecution of insults is the problem?