8mo ago

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 the be-the-stasi-you-wish-to-see-in-the-world dept

InflectionPointUSA @lemm.ee

PanArab @lemm.ee

8mo ago

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 /2025/02/18/german-prosecutors-think-its-funny-peoples-homes-are-being-raided-and-their-devices-seized-because-they-said-stuff-on-the-internet/

Europe @feddit.org

PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat

8mo ago

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 /2025/02/18/german-prosecutors-think-its-funny-peoples-homes-are-being-raided-and-their-devices-seized-because-they-said-stuff-on-the-internet/

32 comments

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.
  
  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.
  
  The laws will always be applied inconsistently.
- 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.
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!!!
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).
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.
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.
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.
  
  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
  
  courts are part of the government…
Its pretty wild to see a privacy sub defend and agree with this kind of stuff. Shits evil.
"You can't take away people's right to be assholes."
Demolition Man
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.

32 comments