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Re:In Germany, online hate speech has real world consequences by adventured on Sunday January 14, 2018 @05:33AM (#16143645)
No, it's the fault of the German authorities and the German culture. They've been pushing toward increased speech controls online since the Web became popular. The point is to better match their speech restrictions offline. The imbalance between the two was guaranteed to end. This didn't just start with the popularization of Facebook the last ten years.
Re:In Germany, online hate speech has real world consequences by hwh on Sunday January 14, 2018 @05:51AM (#16143707)
Unless you give more facts, I'd say you are mostly repeating the argument the post you answered to, albeit from another viewpoint. Of course there is the notion that the law is applied to offline and online talk in the same way. The most important distinction in german law is whether the talk is made in public. And Facebook (and to a degree Twitter) surely brought the possibility to a lot of people to make their talk public who hadn't as easy access to an audience before. And surely, Facebook and Twitter did not give proper access to remedies for victims before. What they had was a broad, intransparent workflow that did not match the german law. Civil suits against them regarding such issues are, due to the nature of such suits against huge foreign corporations, mostly inaccessible if you are not equipped with enough funds to go to court for a few rounds.

This is not to say that the law is fine. Its intentions, however, arguably are. To oppose this viewpoint, you would have to defend a world where hate speech and libel go (erratically, but mostly) without defense for the victims. From a very libertarian viewpoint, that may be an acceptable sacrifice, though.

Re:In Germany, online hate speech has real world consequences by skrause on Sunday January 14, 2018 @05:50AM (#16143705)
> No, it's the fault of the German authorities and the German culture. They've been pushing toward increased speech controls online since the Web became popular.

Source? Because as a German I strongly disagree with that statement.

Re:In Germany, online hate speech has real world consequences by falsprofet on Sunday January 14, 2018 @09:37AM (#16144400)
For one anecdote, webmasters are held liable for comments hosted on their discussion platforms, if there's no moderation.