German Prosecutors Think It’s Funny People’s Homes Are Being Raided And Their Devices Seized Because They Said Stuff On The Internet
(www.techdirt.com)
from florencia@lemmy.blahaj.zone to privacy@lemmy.ml on 18 Feb 23:06
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/22140650
from florencia@lemmy.blahaj.zone to privacy@lemmy.ml on 18 Feb 23:06
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/22140650
from the be-the-stasi-you-wish-to-see-in-the-world dept
threaded - newest
If this is happening in east Germany, it would not surprise anyone that hate speech is on an insanely high and dangerous level. Most of the afd nazi voters are in east Germany. Should you be criminally charge for a call to murder, voilence genocide and other racism, holocaust denial? Absolutely. Lets not pretend that neo Nazis are political satire geniuses.
I’m not from East Germany, and not inclined to argue with those justifications. They sound valid and despicable.
Let’s also not pretend that this law which is justified for the reasons in your post is being consistently applied to those ends.
The article mentions that they are hitting 95% rate of failure to convict, which tells me that the laws are being applied capriciously.
Speech laws being applied capriciously are definitely a tool in the despot’s pocket, and the article also mentions seizures that were unlawful and apparently politically driven. Insulting politicians should never result in charges or property seizure like this, especially when the laws being wielded purport to protect the vulnerable.
The laws will always be applied inconsistently.
A quick search and you will notice that the people suddenly concerned about Germanies hatespeech laws are trustworthy folks like jd vance, trump and other far right actors. Also the fact that procecusion doesn’t happen often, shows that it is enforced with causion and not arbitrary like in the case of the current US deportation nightmare. That is abuse of power. Maybe the US wouldn’t have trumps fascist takeover, if they had speech laws, like in Germany.
So just because people you don’t like express concern about something means that it automatically must be false? This type of “logic” is very dangerous. And prosecution clearly does happen a lot. Literally 10 cases a day in one German state according to the article and only 0.5 of those cases actually result in conviction, which means that clearly this is used to intimidate and punish people generally rather than a sincere attempt to enforce the law.
95% failure to convict indicates the defendants may have shown rehabilitation and regret so the judge applied jurisprudence. I know this may be a foreign concept to a US american but in the civilised world, prison is a rehabilitation solution, not a “for profit” slavery distributor to help GAP and McDonald’s get free labour.
Lol, no one who just “expresses concern” will be sued in Germany. It will always be insults and incitement to violence that will lead to this.
However I would say that there have been trials because of really “easy” insults, started by politicians. And here you’ve got a point IMO that these laws are also used for intimidation. As a politician you should be able to tolerate some insults without having to sue each and every offender out there.
It doesn’t take calls for murder or genocide. In Germany you can have your house raided for posting a meme which calls the minister of economy an idiot. The same minister of economy who doesn’t know what a bankruptcy is, and whose entire working experience is as an author of children’s books.
In another case the office of an opposition newspaper was raided, all their computers and even office chairs were taken away by police. All under the pretense that it was an ordinary association and not protected by freedom of the press. However courts found that this was unjustified, and so police had to carry all the items back inside a few days later.
Uh, did your account get hacked?
That’s like literal AfD propaganda you are repeating here.
And while there is some very limited truth to the first (but he has had similar competences on state level for many years), the “opposition newspaper” is like an actual extreme right wing rag and the legal process is still ongoing, the courts just ruled that the minister of interior overstepped her official competence by trying to shut it down in the legal grey area way she tried doing it.
Meanwhile, United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese:
“What is happening in Germany is not normal.”
“The more I hear, the more I’m shocked. This is a country that has lectured the Global South on fundamental freedoms—freedom of assembly, freedom of opinion.”
“What are Germans waiting for to say: enough!”
…mesnumeriques.fr/…/8rRt3zjJDDebY35oSATi3B
The article focuses on Lower Saxony, which is in West Germany. These cases are not about inciting violence or denying a genocide but about saying something about a politician that that person doesn’t like. Many American liberals would be prosecuted under these laws right now for the stuff that is said on e.g. Reddit, presumably BlueSky and Lemmy.world. Reminder that this sort of stuff also affects pro-Palestine activists and in fact from what I gather that is in fact the case in Germany today.
For calling a politician a pimmel?
Imagine if half of liberal America was prosecuted for calling Trump “orange cheeto” or saying he has small hands. WTF is this even.
Imagine trump was procecuted each time he called for genocide of an entire ethnicity.
As someone who had their tech confiscated by german police (not due to hatespeech though but something else I do not wish to talk about) I can tell you, suddenly loosing pretty much all of your hardware is no fun at all. Especially since you won’t be seeing it again for a long time, in my case it took about 2 years and that was with a settlement outside of court.
Yea the tech was worthless after that time and they also lost the lid of my grinder!!!
Hope y’all remember how we had the propaganda blitz about the made up social credit system in China that everybody in the west was freaking out about. Well, now we can see what that actually looks like in real life.
Germany is a wild place.
The world is a wild place. I think it’s relatively good here still
Fair enough. Its a shame that the entire western world seems to be collectively trying to eliminate democracy.
I think most people want to keep democracy, it’s the ultra rich which use facism to dismantle it.
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Damn don’t get me wrong I’m against hate speech but government is not the one to decide what is hate speech and what is not that’s how a democracy is destroyed.
The government didn’t decide that though, courts do. As long as that still holds, that’s exactly how democracies are not destroyed, isnt it? I think, German law enforcement may be overstepping their boundaries in these cases and for example in the case of Andy Grote mentioned in the article, the actions taken were actually ruled to have been illegal (in court). Honestly seems more like a democracy doing democracy things.
courts are part of the government…
No, courts are just naturally occuring phenomenon, like the weather or the tides 😌
What I’m referring to by “government” is the executive branch. This might be a difference in languages and/or political systems, but that’s what is commonly referred to in Germany by “government”. This excludes the judiciary branch and therefore the courts.
it might be a difference of language but it’s important to recognize that courts are part of your system of governance regardless of the words you use to describe it, and are subject to most of the same incentives and corrupting influences, and some thatare unique to courts.
These kind of laws are gonna get used against political dissent and rivals by the government. It’s so obvious honestly if you can’t see it then I don’t know what to say
Yes, I think this is what we’re gonna see. Even more so once the far right takes power. They will use the anti-hate speech laws against their creators because they are easy to abuse.
This is an Afd talking point bit by bit and is part of a concerted effort from the anglophone fascist world to get that nice Swiss lady as a Kanzlerin. There’s so much money being pumped into EU far right is not even funny.
Interesting how we see here news, related to the AFD, just a few days before the elections.
To be honest I hate that.
Guys like Bannon or Elmo are the visible faces of a much broader movement that has been diverting funds towards the European far right. We’re seeing a reverse paperclip op. There isn’t a single far right European party with electoral expression that wasn’t involved in some scandal about funding of dubious origins (in countries where there is oversight).
.
"You can’t take away people’s right to be assholes."
That law is definitely problematic. The phrasing was even back then critizised rightfully as too broad, too open to interpretation. It generates a bad precedent, as it could just as well be used against anti fascism activists once the AFD manages to grab power anywhere.
Now where does that come from? It stemmed from one of those actionism-phases in politics where someone said ‘oh there’s so much hate on the internet, it inspires hate on the streets, what should we do?’
The backdrop was a consistent uprising in really troubling hate speech on the internet, where people with their clear names called for lynching politicians and their families. The thing is, addressing this would not have required new laws. We would have been fine with someone actually persecuting the laws we already had.
Now the “new law” ofc makes it easier to persecute those criminal cases. But that prosecution still only happens if the police actually stand up to it. Arguments like “insufficient public interest” “insufficient staffing” “that could have been anyone writing this, how should we know that an account named Max Mustermann actually belongs to said Max Mustermann” still give the police in the more right wing states in Eastern Germany easy ways out. If they don’t want to prosecute a crime, they will always find a way around it.
With all that being said, I can only concur with observations that this law is only now being discussed in international news as right-wing governments with media ties try to make a bad mood against Germany and influence the upcoming elections. Otherwise the anti-protest laws in the UK that bring climate activists behind bars for peaceful non-violent protests would top those headlines every time.
Tl/DR; yes, that law is shit and good intentions don’t help. Police still only prosecute those they want.
Its pretty wild to see a privacy sub defend and agree with this kind of stuff. Shits evil.
ACAB
No matter the country, pigs will be pigs
(correction: they are worse than pigs)