Favouriting this for the next time someone on here tells me we don't have free speech in Europe, only in the US
As an European, you think you actually have free speech? Go say something negative about Muslims or your country being full during any protest, I dare you. Because you will absolutely face criminal charges for that.
People say shit about Muslims and our country being full all the time and nothing happens.
The law does make it illegal to insight violence though so if you publicly suggest buring down a hotel you might find yourself in trouble.
It makes a lot more sense than being investigated by the FBI because you wrote a negative article about the head or being charged for reposting some cryptic numbers.
> The House and Senate Armed Services committees have long had an interest in ensuring that unfiltered news went to the troops who are fighting for our country and deserved to read the truth, not propaganda. In the late 1980s Congress was alarmed at attempts of military personnel to “suppress unfavorable news” of the Iran-Contra affair and other issues. Congress mandated that Stars and Stripes be editorially independ…
The Trump administration is basically Reagan 2.0, but our political process has degraded to the point where the corruption and graft are even more blatant this time. Many of the current cabinet were involved in the Reagan admin too.
Their actions are the same - gutting the administrative state, squashing environmental regulations, persecuting queer people and racial minorities. Mass deportations. These were all hallmarks of the terrible Reagan presidency too. Even "Make America Great Again" is a reused slogan from the Reagan days.
Unfortunately the same uneducated morons who hold Reagan up as a great president are behind Trump right now, cheering this car crash of an administration even as they get us involved in new wars.
One would expect that system would learn and change, and we wouldn't have trump fucking up half of global economy so beautifully on his morning whims just to get rich as a side business of being potus (or reverse, probably). Something tells me that after this dark period is over, there won't be many lessons learned and things changed for the better in the system. 'Great system' not being so great after all (which it…
I don't know why you are down voted. Tons of bots in here it's ridiculous. None of this is normal.
There's a fair number of non-bot MAGA voters in here too. The usual pattern is they say something stupid and then whine and bitch about the downvotes they get. Unfortunately the slavering morons are all around us these days.
I think you can turn this into a proper, nuanced position by contrasting how the US typically values protection of free speech higher than protection from libel/slander/defamation. Just consider prominent recent examples, like the german student protester that was investigated by police and had his sign confiscated (it just said "Merz (current cancellor) suck balls"). This seems ridiculous and draconian by US standar…
> This seems ridiculous and draconian by US standards.
The DHS is sending subpoenas to google over mildly critical online posts. [0] By your own standards, that must be ridiculous and draconian too, yes?
> The House and Senate Armed Services committees have long had an interest in ensuring that unfiltered news went to the troops who are fighting for our country and deserved to read the truth, not propaganda. In the late 1980s Congress was alarmed at attempts of military personnel to “suppress unfavorable news” of the Iran-Contra affair and other issues. Congress mandated that Stars and Stripes be editorially independ…
The Trump administration is basically Reagan 2.0, but our political process has degraded to the point where the corruption and graft are even more blatant this time. Many of the current cabinet were involved in the Reagan admin too. Their actions are the same - gutting the administrative state, squashing environmental regulations, persecuting queer people and racial minorities. Mass deportations. These were all hallm…
I think that normalizes the radical changes Trump has made, including aggressively challenging election results, ending the independence of the Department of Justice and FBI, and using them to attack political enemies, extraordinary expansion of a federal law enforcement force (apparently to serve Trump's political interests), nationalist trade policies including high tariffs, undermining national security allies, undermining intelligence secrecy, appointing people highly unqualified by existing standards, threatening freedom of the press (including having private sector allies acquire a dominant share of news and other public communication), ...
I think you can turn this into a proper, nuanced position by contrasting how the US typically values protection of free speech higher than protection from libel/slander/defamation. Just consider prominent recent examples, like the german student protester that was investigated by police and had his sign confiscated (it just said "Merz (current cancellor) suck balls"). This seems ridiculous and draconian by US standar…
I work at a German university. We had pro Palestinian protests 4 times a year for a while now and there has not been a single arrest. In fact there has not been a single police officer present over the past 4 years that would have even carried out an arrest. The only reason for a police officer to typically enter university grounds are noise complaints. The case you quoted did happen, but it is one of a few crazy out…
I'm not saying that you can't protest in Germany, just that european free speech/defamation protection tends to lean a bit more against defamation.
You call that a crazy outlier, but under the previous administration some retiree had police knock on his door and confiscate his tablet (!) because he posted a meme calling a member of the green party an "idiot" (Schwachkopf).
Meanwhile, all the counterexamples that people bring up here are strictly tied to the Trump administration.
I think you can turn this into a proper, nuanced position by contrasting how the US typically values protection of free speech higher than protection from libel/slander/defamation. Just consider prominent recent examples, like the german student protester that was investigated by police and had his sign confiscated (it just said "Merz (current cancellor) suck balls"). This seems ridiculous and draconian by US standar…
Like the standard of denying people entry to the country based on their social media posts? Or deporting them for the same? Or the standard of tear-gassing a peaceful "No Kings" crowd of U.S. citizens, full of children? Or literally investigating all protestors, at scale? https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/us/politics/justice-dept-...
Those, to me, are mainly authoritarian tendencies of the current administration.
That is a different argument: The Trump administration is not really shifting the defamation vs. free speech tradeoff in the US (you could argue that it does, in the opposite direction, by slandering political opponents with insulting nicknames like "crooked Hillary" or "sleepy Joe").
I think you can turn this into a proper, nuanced position by contrasting how the US typically values protection of free speech higher than protection from libel/slander/defamation. Just consider prominent recent examples, like the german student protester that was investigated by police and had his sign confiscated (it just said "Merz (current cancellor) suck balls"). This seems ridiculous and draconian by US standar…
> This seems ridiculous and draconian by US standards. The DHS is sending subpoenas to google over mildly critical online posts. [0] By your own standards, that must be ridiculous and draconian too, yes? [0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/us-dhs-aclu-lawsuit-canadian-j...
Yes. But there is still a significant difference between some agency snooping around when it shouldn't and police physically taking your things, and exactly that happened both under the current and the previous german administration, just for milquetoasty insults ("idiot" and " suck balls", respectively). Both cases are great examples of the Streisand effect btw, there is even a short film about the first one.
I think you can turn this into a proper, nuanced position by contrasting how the US typically values protection of free speech higher than protection from libel/slander/defamation. Just consider prominent recent examples, like the german student protester that was investigated by police and had his sign confiscated (it just said "Merz (current cancellor) suck balls"). This seems ridiculous and draconian by US standar…
Not quite the same thing since it was a school official rather than police, but we had something similar in the US. Right down to confiscation of a juvenille sign.
I think you can turn this into a proper, nuanced position by contrasting how the US typically values protection of free speech higher than protection from libel/slander/defamation. Just consider prominent recent examples, like the german student protester that was investigated by police and had his sign confiscated (it just said "Merz (current cancellor) suck balls"). This seems ridiculous and draconian by US standar…
Not quite the same thing since it was a school official rather than police, but we had something similar in the US. Right down to confiscation of a juvenille sign. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_v._Frederick
That still seems somewhat defensible to me; there has to be line somewhere (you probably would want to suspend students advertising crack cocaine use during school, right?). And "I got suspended during school despite doing something that was not literally illegal" is a weak position in the first place IMO.
But police knocking on your door and confiscating your device because you called some politician an "idiot" by posting an online meme seems almost unthinkable in the US, when even the president himself is slinging insults like that at political opponents all the time.
My point is not that there is clear black/white line and the US have free speech and Europe doesn't, just that the free speech/defamation tradeoff is slightly different.