I would honestly love that. No more paid trolls on social media, the democratic process has a chance to adapt to technology, we can avoid the fate of the US.
Companies are neither minors or adults. Account management for paid shills will be handled between customer support backend infra and social media API servers, not subject to any particular rules.
... and all the social media posts having been pre-approved by Minitrue. What a glorious world we shall live in.
This is no longer just rhetoric. Meanwhile, the EU’s polite, tea-drinking cousin, the UK has quietly deployed a “social media surveillance unit.” Not to fight trolls or bots, of course - but to ensure His Majesty’s Subjects think correctly in public. Doubleplusgood, wouldn’t you say? [1]
One does not have to be anti-immigrant to not be happy about immigration policies. It is known at this point that the Kremlin is actively helping migrants to come to Europe. If an enemy knows that this will be to the detriment of Europe, maybe Europeans themselves should also acknowledge that?
Yes but (risky absolute statement) criticizing the policies themselves, in isolation from the immigrants who are already here, never got anyone in trouble with the law.
I think US republicans are going into panic mode because a lot of the people who get punished for this are right wing adjacent, not very bright people, and they misinterpret this as their equivalents in Europe somehow getting suppressed.
So they try the same tactics as they know from home, asserting their rights, conflating separate issues, slippery sloping etc. And they freak out when it doesn’t work.
The UK arrested around 12.5k people in 2023 over social media posts, according to the Times. Not all of them related to immigration at all (but I would wager: many are).
It is sufficient to 'cause distress' - against whom, or in what form, or what qualifies as 'distress' is deliberately kept vague to maximise persecution rates. Some cases saw a squad car with six Bobbies take the very average, middle-class parents of a teenage daughter to the precinct to question them on why their daughter has had strong opinions on the way her school's new head was chosen [1]. While - as so often - no-one was later sent to a court for sentencing, the chilling effects are there, and I'd say half a platoon of police officers descending on someone's front lawn is definitely "getting in trouble with the law".
> More often than not, the police record these episodes as “non-crime hate incidents”, with over 13,200 recorded last year. What’s so extraordinary about the police’s zealous pursuit of these non-criminals is that the rate at which they’re catching actual criminals is falling. Fewer than seven in 100 crimes now lead to a charge or summons, down from 17 in 100 in 2015. In the year to September 2023, the total number of burglaries left unsolved stood at 213,814, a rise of 4 per cent on the previous year.
So ... police gets their numbers up persecuting people for wrong thought while they avoid having to deal with actual, real criminals which might fight back violently. And Whitehall is clapping to it.
Then there is the case of David Wootton - who is currently fighting against a verdict that declared him having a tasteless halloween costume in a social media post (dressing up as the Manhattan Area bomber, with an arab headscarf, an 'I love Ariana Grande' t-shirt, and a backpack that read 'boom') to be a count of 'hate crime'. He faces up to two years in prison over that. Deeply tasteless? Sure. A 'hate crime' worth of spending two years in prison over? Seriously?
Let's move away from the UK - to Germany, an actual EU state. Which reintroduced a lèse-majesté law that makes it more prosecutable - and carries harder sentencing - if you post something against a politician that they do not like. That law is used most happily especially by the Green Party, but they all are complicit. It led to early-morning Special Forces raids against the former flat of someone who called a politician '1 dick', and standard raid against someone who called a former minister of economics 'a doofus' in what could easily be understood as satirical use of a common brand name. Sometimes, quoting them with wrong interpunctation is reason for a raid, and sometimes just quoting them is enough. And the state prosecutors? Laugh on American TV about how they know they never get most of the cases through a proper court case, but 'the raid in itself is the punishment already' [2].
And, fun fact: Courts have decided that even stating the truth about a politician can qualify as a prosecutable insult ("Schmähkritik") if it is 'sufficient to negatively impact their future political work'. So better thing twice, and have an exit plan before you point out that Patrick O. Litican is a compulsive liar, with a list of deliberate lies told by Patrick in the past, and casting shadow over a bold claim he has just used to shoehorn another policy in.
These aren't aberrations. They're stress-tests of the system’s tolerance for dissent. And it’s failing - gloriously, publicly, and with a press release. Europe is on a dark, dark trajectory, and it needs to be monitored very closely when they keep increasing policing powers.
It’s funny that you can’t point to a single case that proves your point and be done with it (you still haven’t), and you need to frame it all in what looks like delirious ramblings.
There is a human trafficking business fuelled by huge amounts of public money given to NGOs and related, within Europe, by the hands of politicians that are lining their own pockets with this public money. And their political parties are silent about it... (maybe because they distribute part of it within the party contributions latter or who knows). We are talking about thousands of millions of euros annually.
Why are not the "journalists" in Europe investigating this? Je!
I mean, the Kremlin doesn't have such a wide area of influence over all the European borders; they only have influence over part of those borders, in a typical mob-like way (their way, their mob oligarchy). They could not be doing all what is happening alone without help from within Europe. It's all about public money and some politicians pockets within their respective countries - it is an inside job... , cut that money to those NGOs and related, process those corrupts, and see what will happen.
The german green party’s effort to phase out nuclear energy ended up being spearheaded by someone on Kremlins payroll. Spycraft and international politics is not about wearing trenchcoats after dark, it is about influencing, capturing and manipulating the correct people with the most leverage. It is also far easier to influence someone who is already corrupt - they already probably have compromat on them and they are already OK with doing something bad. Similarly, well natured people are just as susceptible to being influenced unless they are very diligent about refusing donations.
Because we all know that an instrument given to law enforcement, once installed, is never used for other things later. All the things we set up to combat terrorism or protect children turned out to be used for those exact use-cases.
The problem is the instrument in itself, and the message it sends - not the officially intended use.
Unless they are government backed trolls with fake ids issued ad-hoc by that government. That's one of the possibilities.
People already sell access to their Google accounts so buyers can run not-that-legal ad campaigns. Creating one extra step won't do much to solve problems as long as the incentive is big enough and budget is sufficient.
In the 1930s, the Dutch government conducted a census that included religion. The Netherlands, after all, had a comprehensive population registry system (Bevolkingsregister) established in the 19th century. This registry was centralized, continuously updated, and included religion, addresses, family connections, and occupations.
After the German occupation in 1940, the Nazis accessed and exploited the Dutch population registry, including religious affiliation.
About 75–80% of the ~140,000 Jews in the Netherlands were killed.
This is the highest percentage in Western Europe.
Compare that to France, which had a more fragmented administrative system, and less complete central records and 25% of Jews in France were deported and killed — a much lower percentage than the Netherlands.
As usual, when reaching the Godwin point, the idea is not for you to take it at face value, but to extrapolate to your situation.
The concentration of power and centralized people tracking are eventually always abused, and once your system becomes less free (which has historically eventually happened on a long enough timescale), you will pay the price for it.
In our case, having a full history of all opinions, interactions, locations, and behavior linked to full identity of people is what we are ultimately talking about here. It's already well on its way, but it will make it worse.
The more you concentrate power and feed data about people, the greater the potential damage.
And of course, it doesn't need to be a full-on dictatorship to get problems with those.
It's a spectrum of increasing problems you will get, the more you lean into it.
> In our case, having a full history of all opinions, interactions, locations, and behavior linked to full identity of people is what we are ultimately talking about here. It's already well on its way, but it will make it worse.
Well, not really. Age verification doesn't have to, and IMO should not, lead to a linked identity. Just a blind check "are you a real human older than X years old? Yes! OK". That way you get the benefits of age restrictions and real human validation, without any of the potential privacy ramifications.
But to be clear, most real people's online presence is under their own names (or linked trivially to their own names, like a cutesy turn on their name for an instagram handle that is linked to their Facebook account which has their full name). It's already possible, and done, to track your public social media presence and interactions. Places like HN and even Reddit are much more niche than that.
That's the whole point of this thread, the current setup makes a google account mandatory, with all the terrible consequences on private life that it has.
Not to detract from the rest of your message, but it wasn't centralized; the data was collected and stored in each municipality separately. The only part that is centralized is the historical archive: after death, each person's info card is moved to the National Archives.
This system has never been centralized, even after digitization: birth records are still kept only in the town of birth, and when moving house your active records must be officially requested and the transfer manually authorized between municipal systems.
>This registry was centralized, continuously updated, and included religion, addresses, family connections, and occupations.
Sorry, but why would the Dutch government need to know all those details in the first place? Did Dutch citizens never ask that question back then? Nazis or no Nazis, that was an issue waiting to happen. I guess it wouldn't have mattered if they did, since the Netherlands was a kingdom and people didn't have much say into how the monarchy ran things.
To do governing properly you want to understand the impact your policies are having, and I general that means more data can give you better answers. In a world where the invasion had not happened yet it was not unreasonable to collect as much as we could and store it in threefold. Things are different now, once bitten twice shy.
Do Americans or Europeans ask any questions with regarding to why the Government wants to pass these anti-privacy laws, or how is it even supposed to reduce "child grooming", etc.?
Maybe the Dutch citizens did ask these questions you think they did not ask, but the Government won.
Your post highlights how shocked people who don't live in a database state can be when they encounter one.
In the UK you can expect to be asked your ethnicity, sexuality, sex, gender, religion and a few other things every time you apply for a job or interact with the state.
We're already there if you live in places like Germany or the UK. Go on social media and criticize some politicians in the UK/DE about their open borders policies being directly responsible for some of the terror attacks there, and there's a high chance police will knock on your door for "being a right supremacist" and for committing the "speech of hate". I think France, Italy are also following the same path. You know you don't have free speech anymore, when saying facts gets you in trouble.
And this is only the beginning. It will be more and more difficult to speak against the actions of your government the more unpopular the politicians become and the more people hate the results of their policies. And instead of changing course and following the wishes of the voters, politicians instead will clamp down on free speech.
>Go on social media and criticize some politicians in the UK/DE about their open borders policies being directly responsible for some of the terror attacks there, and there's a high chance police will knock on your door for "being a right supremacist" and for committing the "speech of hate".
In the UK that happened when a woman phrased her criticism of open border policies as a call for migrant hotels to be burned down.
This was controversial as many who wanted closed border policies (like Nigel Farage and supporters) thought that rallying crys to re-enact some kind of version of kristallnacht should count as protected political speech.
I was talking about something else: Nick Griffin and Mark Collett (2004–2006) and Ann Cryer (2003) who got dragged through the courts for "race hate" for speaking up against the Muslim grooming gangs, which the political establishment brushed off as racism and hate speech, until they couldn't cover it up anymore.
Now it would be naive to assume the political establishment only stopped at one cover up and there's not more under the rug that haven't been yet uncovered.
Just like with the post office workers scandal, you realize the political establishment doesn't exist to protect you the taxpayer, it only exists to protect itself from the accountability of its citizens and will go to great length in censorship, suppression and legal battles to defend itself, since there's nothing for them to loose if they loose, as none of them are ever going to jail for their mistakes, but if they win, then their image stays clean and can stay in power for longer.
Ah yes, that totally nullifies my clients' rape charges your honor. Sure there's whiteness and DNA evidence, but he insulted their religion and since nobody ever gets away with insulting Christianity in this country, they get a free pass from the rapes as compensation for their trauma.
There’s nothing in your article about the rape so I’d have to trust you on that, but I can’t given how liberally you mix your own beliefs with sourced information.
You mean France and Italy where the parties which blame open border policies are governing? Somehow the whole rightwing discourse looks to me based on scare tactics: it will be so bad, it's not yet bad but just wait and it will be! All fortune tellers in that wing indeed.
>You mean France and Italy where the parties which blame open border policies are governing?
Is Le Pen governing in France and I'm not aware of? Because I've never seen Macron do that.
And people are the ones blaming open borders, then some parties choose to capitalize on that (even if they ultimately do nothing), while some other parties choose to suppress that viewpoint as being right wing propaganda and that in reality there are no issue with open borders, that all the crime is imaginary, which is why they push for online censorship and anti-encryption laws, to make sure only their viewpoint becomes the only legally allowed one.
Let me underline again that with the "fortune teller". I don't take the absolute view on the internet freedom of speech, that hate speech should be allowed. As hate speech is not allowed on the playground (you get your parents called in) and not allowed on the street (you get slapped) it's not acceptable on the internet either. We can talk details, that the current implementation is faulty, and please come up with proposal how to make it better without running into the full censorship which nobody wants, but also not allowing campaigns based on straight out lying - campaigns all too pervasive nowadays (and yes in real life lying is penalized as well, so there). Or ok if you think lying and aggression on the internet should be permitted because dunno internet, at least be sincere with that and don't beat around the bush showing an imaginary boogieman.
You're moving the goalposts to hate speech. When saying uncomfortable negative facts about government's actions are considered "hate speech" then you're no longer living in a free country. You must realize that.
The whole hate speech can of worms is such a dangerous slippery slope since the government can just sweep all criticism of itself and its actions as "hate speech" whenever it feels like it, and just ban it, problem solved, no more criticism, all citizens are happy, just like in USSR.
"Hate speech" is too broad of an umbrella to ensure it will never be used in bad faith because it 100% will be and it is. Whichever political party will come to power next will 100% gonna weaponize the existing speech censorship rules implemented by previous regimes, in its own favor to further entrench their own power. History proves this yet people are oblivious an think the solution is even more speech censorship.
Like you correctly underlined, we are talking here about a slippery slope. Because all what you present is imaginary implications - in the realm of possibility, I agree, just still imaginary in this moment. Now, what could be done to avoid the slippery slope? Is the law really saying "hate speech" without any qualifications?
Nothing I said is imaginary. That's like saying Hitler's rise to power was imaginary or that the Holocaust was imaginary. If it were imaginary they won't be spending so much effort on censorship.
It's the classic subversion and propaganda stages of denial, the deeper you dive:
Stage 1: It's not happening, you're just imagining it
Stage 2: OK, it's happening but only a little bit no need to exaggerate
Stage 3: OK it's happening a lot but here's why it's a good thing that it's happening
Nobody is suppressing the view that outsider migrants are the root of most evil in the west, just as nobody suppressed view that the outsider Jews are the root of most evil in the west in the 1930s. It's been a mainstream view in multiple mainstream media outlets for years.
> while some other parties choose to suppress that viewpoint as being right wing propaganda and that in reality there are no issue with open borders
To start with, there is no such thing as open borders (unless you mean Schengen?).
Second, saying someone is spouting nonsense isn't "suppression". Especially when the "suppressed" viewpoint is being proudly repeated almost daily on TV, radio and online on media sponsored by billionaires investing heavily into passing this message (like Bolloré).
Third, Le Pen isn't governing in France, but her party (reminder, she was banned from standing for office for corruption and stealing public money to enrich herself and her family, so it's no longer her), which has around 1/3 of the votes is crucial in maintaining the current ruling government. Without their support, the government has ~1/3 and fails a vote of no confidence immediately (the other 1/3 hates them both and would happily bring it all down in the hopes of new elections). So they are de facto exercising a lot of control.
Stefan Niehoff was prosecuted for a tweet that compared the policies towards COVID-unvaccinated people to how the Third Reich treated Jews. He also made comparisons to the Nazis with respect to how the German government is treating the AfD. These are both criticisms of government policy with respect to public health and handling of democratic opposition parties. The man was put through a criminal trial and then found guilty, being fined for his tweets.
He is not an exception. Twice in August 2022, the American playwright, satirist and longtime Berlin resident C.J. Hopkins tweeted cover art from his book on The Rise of the New Normal Reich. This art featured an image of a Covid-era medical mask with a barely-visible white swastika superimposed upon it. In his first tweet, Hopkins wrote that “Masks are symbols of ideological conformity. That’s all that they are, and that’s all they ever were. Stop pretending that they were ever anything else or get used to wearing them.” In his second tweet, Hopkins simply quoted Health Minister Karl Lauterbach’s notorious statement that “Masks always send a signal.”
For those tweets, Amazon Germany promptly banned Hopkins’s book, and eight months later the Berlin state prosecutor’s office informed Hopkins that he was under investigation, because they believed his tweets violated German criminal statutes against “the use of symbols of unconstititional and terrorist organisations.” In January of 2024, Hopkins was tried before the Tiergarten Berlin District Court and acquitted. In many countries that would be the end of it, but in Germany double jeopardy is not a thing. The prosecutor appealed, and Hopkins found himself on trial once again, this time before the Berlin Court of Appeals. The appellate court overturned his acquittal and found him guilty.
So these are two men who have been prosecuted for their criticism of policy, without groups being involved. But the more common pattern goes like this:
Activist: We must welcome infinity Muslim migrants.
Person: No we shouldn't. That would be bad.
Activist: Why do you say that?
Person: Because they commit crimes at a higher rate than we do and their culture is incompatible with ours.
Activist: That's hate speech and you are going to be fined/imprisoned for it.
When the left is obsessed with group-based identity politics, there's no difference between banning criticism of groups and banning criticism of left wing politics. Enforcing the former is simply a way to prevent anyone explaining or justifying their position, meaning they can't actually advocate for it. It's no difference to an outright ban on opposition.
I do believe you will say it endlessly, as you're clearly in denial about what's happening (lemme guess, are you German?).
Germany is months away from outright banning the AfD, the primary opposition party that has hundreds of MPs, on the basis that the SED um I mean the SPD hates their policies. That's what punishment of dissent looks like, what a regime looks like: bulk disenfranchising a quarter of the population because they object to left wing policy.
If they get those judges appointed it'll likely be lights out for German democracy. All the AfD MPs will disappear overnight, leaving the left wing parties with a majority. They will then launch a vote of no confidence in Merz and take over the government, at which point the already extremely harsh oppression of the left's enemies will be ramped up much further still. The right will be fully driven underground by many more prosecutions of the form you claim aren't about punishing dissent, and Germany will be fully converted to the DDR model in which there are theoretically competitive elections, but the only parties allowed to exist are all on the left.
I really hope you're not German, that you're just very stubborn instead. Because if Germany does get turned into a left wing dictatorship there's no limit to how crazy and dysfunctional life there will become. The USA will be paradise in comparison.
Am I understanding you correctly here - your idea of free speech is that people should be able to wear/use Nazi symbols proudly? That's what you mean when you say there's no free speech in Europe?
Both of those men used the Nazi symbol as a warning: "this policy seems bad in a totalitarian way, like what those very bad people did in the 1930s, so we shouldn't be doing that". They didn't wear these symbols, nor present them as a representation of their own beliefs, nor glorify them in any way. They used them as a compact representation of where they feared the slippery slope can lead.
Discussing history, learning from it and avoiding a repeat of it is a foundational justification for political speech. If Germans cannot point to their own past to warn about the present - and under the current German government they clearly can't because people who do keep getting prosecuted - then they cannot learn from it and might well repeat it.
All of this is obvious. The last two paragraphs were already very clear in my previous post. There was no way to interpret them the way you did, so I don't believe you are arguing in good faith. At his trial, CJ Hopkins pointed out that mainstream German media routinely printed the swastika on their front page in relation to the AfD, yet they weren't prosecuted under the same legal theory he was being prosecuted under. The symbols aren't really banned. The judgement, when finally read out, didn't make any mention of the defense arguments at all. It was a show trial and everyone knew it, including independent journalists:
They did that knowing that Nazi symbols were banned in Germany. They did it on purpose to get in trouble with the law in order to conflate the two things: 1) using Nazi symbols, 2) criticizing government policy.
it's a classic motte and bailey approach, and I'm sure they're grateful to you for defending their demagoguery.
I already addressed your claim Nazi symbols are forbidden in the post you clearly didn't read (again).
It's darkly amusing that you guys have gone from "source?!" to "it's good that the provocative troublemakers are being punished" in the span of about 5 posts whilst you simultaneously flag kill FirmwareBurner. Nothing screams "we have free speech in Europe" like aggressive censoring of people who point out you don't.
Whatever dude. You can deny what's happening for a while, but one day you'll wake up and realize everyone around the world just sort of ambiently knows that Europe has become a totalitarian dictatorship.
Then skip all the articles talking about your First Amendment as if it’s somehow relevant :D
It’s hilarious how far you have to reach to get any criticism where I simply asked you for one, one single case of someone going to jail for criticizing policies and you just can’t provide it.
Instead endlessly moving goalposts and projection of your own understanding of how laws should work.
Btw the anti hate speech laws are there to prevent disasters like those from the Nazi time, and for a good reason. Speech has consequences.
> I simply asked you for one, one single case of someone going to jail for criticizing policies and you just can’t provide it.
Stop being a troll. I never said people went to jail for that. Read my comments again. I said people in Germany got in trouble with the law for that, which they did, and I posted proof.
Now you're unhappy you've been disproven so you're being a disingenuous bad faith commenter and moving the goalpost from getting in trouble with the law to going to jail, as if that makes Germany's censorship less worse ("Oh, I only got dragged through court by a politicians for calling him a dick on Facebook and only ended up with a 7k fine, at least I didn't got o jail for that, thank god, such a free country I live in").
>Btw the anti hate speech laws are there to prevent disasters like those from the Nazi time, and for a good reason. Speech has consequences.
Congrats, Germany today is doing exactly what the Nazis and the Stasi did: banning free speech to "prevent the evil guys from getting power". Do you see the irony in what you're advocating?
And FYI since you keep bringing back the Nazi argument for speech censorship, Hitler didn't get to power because Germany back then didn't have enough speech censorship, because it did and that's why people voted for Hitler since he capitalized on the citizens' frustration with the Weimar Republic's policies and they way they didn't listen to the peoples' grievances and instead responded with speech censorship to crush them .... just like Germany (and UK) are doing ...today.
Speech censorship doesn't make people's grievances and hate for the establishment politic parties go away, it only radicalizes them further guaranteeing the rise of political extremism. AFD already got nearly a third of the votes. In the future when they become a majority, how are you gonna speech censor over half the country? The only guarantee is when they get majority votes they will use all the "guns" against you, that the establishment used against them. History proves this.
So how many times do you have to repeat the same mistakes to re-learn the same lessons?
> or the UK. Go on social media and criticize some politicians in the UK/DE about their open borders policies being directly responsible for some of the terror attacks there,
Could you give any examples of this happening? I assume you aren't referring to the one who called for migrant hotels to be burned down with brown people inside in the middle of race riots?
This is an article that I came across a while ago that speaks to a number of instances in Germany and the UK of people arrested for speech that would be considered acceptable in the states.
Things like calling politicians idiots, giving the middle finger to someone, and insinuating government policy is ineffective.
Show me the story, and it it’s as portrayed (someone went to jail for flipping a politician off), I’ll change my mind.
Until then, it’s made up.
Not to mention that it’s irrelevant to the the original point about hate speech and migration but whatever, you managed to change the goalposts now defend the new ones :)
The OP referred to Germany. Never mind politicians, a quick search brought up a couple of cases where people faced serious penalties including driving bans for flipping off an unmanned speed camera. [1,2] Failure to pay the resulting four-figure fines would certainly have resulted in jail sentences.
I can't find any backing for their assertion that people have gone to jail for obscene gestures toward government entities in either Germany or the UK, but obviously we have already slipped a long way down that particular slope. Apathy doesn't seem like the smart option. It's hard to put it any better than you did yourself: "Here the wolf is clearly visible."
Yes but not the politicians but the police. Yes but not hate speech but criticism of policy. Yes but not criticism of policy but the middle finger. Yes but not to jail but a fine. Yes but…
Because what is right and wrong can be subjective, I could argue that if you said Strawberry is better than Kiwi, that's hate, and suddenly you find yourself on the wrong side of it.
Don't dare say anything with the remotest chance of being controversial or that could have a hint of upsetting someone, don't even think about expressing an opinion that someone might not agree with.
The problem in your ideal digital world isn't that the bad abuse the freedom they have now, it's that the bad will also abuse the lack of freedom everyone else will have then, and suddenly everyone with no ill intent is on the wrong side of the enforcement.
The comment you just replied to would probably find itself on the receiving end of it because of the wording and tone.
With that exact sentence, you could be labeled a racist because I know the code you're using. What YOU really mean is that New Zealanders are better than South Asians.
I wouldn’t get labeled racist by anyone serious and I certainly wouldn’t get any trouble from the law. Try flagging my comment and see if it gets removed.
The thing is the "I know the code you're using" could be entirely made up in the head of the judge/prosecutor with the person being accused of speaking in codes not even having the slightest clue about what the hell the judge/prosecutor is on about.
I've been told that my rainbow flag lapel pin is anti-Christian hate. This opinion seems to be gaining in popularity. If society decides this is the case, which some elements of society are currently making a concerted effort to see through with dozens of bills across dozens of states, is it incumbent upon me to accept it?
Right now in Europe there are people arguing that it's fundamental to the nature of Islam that adherents hate anyone who is not Islamic. They can cite Quran saying some pretty horrendous stuff about non-believers, that they need to be killed in a holy war and things like that. Is it within the bounds of society to decide that being Islamic is ipso facto a hate crime?
"Hate speech" is an excuse to attack people that are not conforming with state/government opinion. It is basically the modern version of "someone has to think of the children". And it is played through conservative, family-value people, like you seem to be.
That’s just false. Hate speech is (simplifying) when you blame a group of people for everything that is bad in the world, and the only thing that group can do to appease you is to cease to exist.
>>public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence toward a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation (= the fact of being gay, etc.)
Godwin's law... But to stay a little more serious: I get your point of view. The question is, is it a good idea to give up anonymity for everyone to fight the nazis? Should we give up our freedom to fight terrorism?
This isn't as good of an example as you think it is. There are crazy communists out there that routinely associate criticism of the existing banking institutions with antisemitism.
By this logic we are no longer allowed to reform banking no matter how flawed it is, even if the flaws of the banking system give rise to actual antisemitism due to unaddressed economic dysfunction. Dysfunction that the banking critics point out and which they claim has more to do with how those institutions are structured and what policies they have enacted than the people inhabiting or benefiting from them.
Dumber yet. There are even more extreme offshoots of communism where simply criticizing capitalism without being a communist means you are a fascist or nazi. It's pretty clear to me that those communists believe they have a monopoly on criticizing capitalism and if you gave them enough power, they'd enforce that monopoly on everyone.
Even dumber. The moment their communist utopia fails, they will start looking for "capitalist" scapegoats rather than fix their institutions according to the non-communist criticism and commit exactly the crimes they projected onto you, which you never had the intention of ever doing, because you actually are somewhat of a pacifist and genuinely believe that your policies and institutions are inclusive to all and work without the need for scapegoats or enforcement through violence.
> Freedom is the great American commitment, but as Snyder argues, we have lost sight of what it means—and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power: We think we’re free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government overreach. But true freedom isn’t so much freedom from as freedom to—the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible.
Snyder is an historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust, who previously wrote an award-wining book on that area during the 1930/40s:
