The Censorship Network: Regulation and Repression in Germany Today

Weird to read something from an unknown (to me) organization which claims censorship in Germany when I as a German can't recall any instances in the last thirty years which I would consider censored in Germany.

Like I mean yes Doom was censored as a game due to gore/violence. But what else?

Have to check the report.

But the thing is: Censorship is not the issue in Germany. Disinformation is. We get too much bullshit information unhindered which causes chaos.

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After a short skim of the report. It takes the angle that Germany's attempt to fight online hatespeech and disinformation would stifle speech and takes concern with paltry sums such as 30-50m spend annually to fight hate speech online. It all sounds pretty ridiculous to me when you consider that Cambridge Analytica doesn't even appear in the report as one of the wake-up calls to European countries that social media has become weaponized to attack democracies and influence elections. This isn't about free speech for Germans in Germany but how can we can keep Chinese interest through TikTok, Russian propaganda through X and comment sections and other foreign influences at bay?

Honestly? Good. We can't just let propagandists from Russia or anywhere else ruin our democracies. When I look in comment sections online on mass platforms (think Facebook, Instagram, etc.) the amount of hate is unreal. The sheer quantity doesn't look organic at all. Even though these opinions are certainly shared by many real people, I suspect a lot of it is bots and propaganda. A bit of modern McCarthyism might be necessary.

As a German, I currently don’t see any meaningful censorship via legislation. That said I do see censorship in practicality via public opinion, shaming and hate against you if you speak out against "mainstream" opinion. That said, a lot of the institutions listed here are actually, at least in principle, made to conquer that, not make it worse. And even if I don’t really see them succeeding at making it better I also don’t see them making it worse…

A lot of people argue today that he was basically correct about Communist infiltration at high levels of the US state department, and the reason we generally think of him as a villain today is because those Communist sympathizers won a political conflict against him and then other Communist sympathizers in American culture-making industries won a cultural conflict against him, which among other consequences is the reason I was taught The Crucible in high school.

Anyway, claims that some group of people are propagandists or that some particular messaging is hateful or fake or propaganda are themselves a type of propaganda. There's no way to evaluate any meta-claim about how we ought to interpret the memes we encounter in society without an object-level understanding of what those memes actually are, which I think is one of the best arguments in favor of radical anti-censorship ideologies.

I think your examples aren't that much censorship but rather individuals/politicians asserting their rights not to let anybody smear them on social media.

The rules which made e.g. insults illegal haven't changed but society stopped allowing anonymous people online getting away with it.

Maybe some background for non-German readers on Pimmelgate (Dick gate):

Pimmelgate happened when a secretary of state in one of the German states was called a 'dick' on social media and the politician had the guy who posted this swatted by state police. The state minister lost the resulting legal battle and was ridiculed online for his short fuse.

Not pretty certainly. Certainly an abuse of power by a politician leading the police in that state, but also widely reported and criticized. In my mind it doesn't compare for instance Donald Trump going after Comey or suing public broadcasters.