A court ruling in Austria could censor the internet worldwide

The law forbids knowingly making false and defamatory statements that could lead to persecution of the accused person.

So for example, you can't accuse someone of being a rapist, for example, if you know that the accusation is not true.

Similarly, you can't accuse a politician of being corrupt just because you don't like them if you don't have any reason to believe that your accusation is true.

But it's absolutely allowed to publically insult a politician. And you also have the right to call a politician corrupt if you have a reason to believe that they are.

For example, I know that calling our former finance minister a corrupt self-serving asshole is not going to get me into trouble because there have been multiple news reports about him taking bribes.

I think for Americans it's just hard to believe that we don't protect made up lies as "free speech" around here.

Do you really think the https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921 case is egregious? The punishment is meaningful, but hardly life or career changing. Just because something has been said in rap lyrics does not mean it's OK to say in all contexts. Do you know the context and what she said? Surely it's conceivable that what she said really was harmful to community. Consider why free speech exists: to protect public debate and essentially hold up the light of transparency to power - clearly there's no trivially obvious line to draw that will protect only that speech, nor a trivially obvious line to draw that will protect all non-harmful speech. So when a society, in a healthy debate not too different to the one we're having now chooses to draw the line somewhere between those too extremes: that's just fine. Personally, I think the US protects speech that simply undermines society (and the US), and that doing so is at worst self-destructive, and at best irrelevant. Yes, we need to protect speech - but we don't need to pretend the line between constructive speech and hate speech is terribly subtle, nor that there is going to be some kind of chilling effect from rules like this. Do you feel threatened by this court outcome? No, right?

I do agree that some of the laws are bad, for instance the law in Germany that protected Turkish politicians from well-deserved criticism. As I hear it, they think that in Germany too: this law isn't some new development by thought-controller wannabe's, it's a bad law on the books that's rarely enforced and that's quite-old; pre WW2. Put in on the pile of failings of the Weimar republic. It's not a small pile.

Regardless, though bad laws should be repealed the larger point stands: these countries have not devolved into Orwellian nightmares. If anything, the real threat isn't Orwell's 1984, it's A Brave New World: a populace that chooses to close its eyes to the truth by simple social feedback loops that reinforce groupthink as opposed to critical examination. If you like literary references, we need to remove our machine-learned equivalent's of Dr. Strangelove's CRM 114 discriminators. To protect discourse, we need to shape the environment it happens in to steer those feedback loops away from outrage-inducing echo chambers that filter our perception of the world to distinguish us from politically others -and instead towards truth-enhancing critical thought. Ideally, all without a central, abusable source of power: sure! But the alternative shouldn't be that we're all forced to inhabit balkanized bubbles of media, carefully curated to be free of all of those pesky facts that might undermine a firmly held opinion.

I am getting a little tired of the continual equating of FAANG companies with "the internet". This article is predicated on the assumption Austria asking Facebook to ban some comment about a greens politician means all such posting are banned from the internet. Clearly, they aren't. At worst, that comment might be banned from web sites owned companies operating in Europe. Obviously, there are a lot of web sites out there owned by people who won't care what Europe thinks. If you don't like any of them create your own.

The "internet" is bigger than one site, or country, or even the EU. If you doubt that, just ask the MPA how they are going with eliminating links to pirated content from the internet. If you asked them in a bar, after a few drinks and out of earshot of their paymasters, I reckon there is a good chance you might even hear them say "it isn't possible". Or you could ask some UK pollie whether they think it's possible to prevent kids from seeing hard porn. I don't have to guess their response - they tried, and gave up.

Politicians are public figures, if someone wants to call them a 'traitor' and/or 'oaf' to their friends, that's fine.

If people are harassing each other, well, there are laws for that too.

> Do you really think the https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921 case is egregious? The punishment is meaningful, but hardly life or career changing. Just because something has been said in rap lyrics does not mean it's OK to say in all contexts. Do you know the context and what she said? Surely it's conceivable that what she said really was harmful to community.

All you are doing is rationalising putting an Ankle braclet on a 17 year old girl because she posted some rap lyrics to face book. There wasn't a violent act, theft or anything that is actually harmful happened.

This nebulous "harmed the community" can be used as an excuse to curtail any of your freedoms. You could say "These homosexuals are harming the community, therefore we can remove them from it".

> Consider why free speech exists: to protect public debate and essentially hold up the light of transparency to power - clearly there's no trivially obvious line to draw that will protect only that speech, nor a trivially obvious line to draw that will protect all non-harmful speech. So when a society, in a healthy debate not too different to the one we're having now chooses to draw the line somewhere between those too extremes: that's just fine. Personally, I think the US protects speech that simply undermines society (and the US), and that doing so is at worst self-destructive, and at best irrelevant. Yes, we need to protect speech - but we don't need to pretend the line between constructive speech and hate speech is terribly subtle, nor that there is going to be some kind of chilling effect from rules like this. Do you feel threatened by this court outcome? No, right?

We didn't choose to draw the line though. The legislation was pushed through in the mid-2000s because of terrorists bombings (by Islamists) in the UK.

The law keeps on being expanded to include more and more trivial things. IIRC A man was arrested for looking through a shop window too oddly.

Once you allow any curtail of speech there will be calls to curtail more of it for the "public good".

> Regardless, though bad laws should be repealed the larger point stands: these countries have not devolved into Orwellian nightmares.

They are locking people up for speech and investigating jokes. So yes they have.