Try to defended those instead.

(Yes, no fine is levied if the content is not taken down, and turns out to not be illegal. What sane company will take such a risk?)

That is wrong. Merely, NetzDG imposes an obligation on specific social network providers to establish an "effective and transparent process" to deal with complaints about unlawful content. Without prescribing a specific process in itself, it specifies certain functional requirements. Among them, this process has to ensure that "blatantly illegal content" is being removed within 24 hours, unless the social network provider has agreed on a longer timespan with the law enforcement agency.

Any fines the NetzDG stipulates do only refer to failures to meet requirements of process design. In no case there are fines for social media providers in the case of wrongfully consider a piece of content lawful in a specific case.

It seems to me that this whole discussion is fundamentally unable to consider these legal nuances. Also, blaming NetzDG for actions of authoritarian governments is just plain silly.

I had a look once at the form in one of Meta services to report hate speech: it does require some effort to fill the form and it does require the issue to be reported to police. If you don’t want to report the case to authorities, the platform will not take down the content. I do not see how this could result in a real censorship in a state with the rule of law.

https://www.techdirt.com/2018/01/12/second-time-week-german-...

https://www.dw.com/en/facebook-slammed-for-censoring-german-...

Fortunately for the defenders of that law, the notoriously opaque censorship of social media companies helps hide what is going on, so few examples surface. I could not find anything as convenient as a list of (wrongfully or not) censored content by this law. Often the censored party is not even told that the NetzDG was involved.

Silence on this issue should not be confused with a lack of problems, however. For example, in Germany:

“it can be a criminal offense in Germany to call another person a ‘jerk,’ or even to use the informal du, or ‘thou,’” to communicate a lack of respect for the recipient. German courts have penalized other similar “derogatory epithets,” including “asshole,” “bastard,” “old goat, “fathead,” “dope,” and “whore.” [..] German courts heard 26,757 criminal insult cases that year, leading to 21,454 convictions and 20,390 fines. - https://law.yale.edu/mfia/case-disclosed/germanys-netzdg-and...

To me this looks like a severe overreach of speech restrictions, even if one doesn't idealize the US 1st amendment, and accepts the need for some government censorship. Yet I've only learned about it just now, from a very obscure post.

Unlabeled satire posted context-free to Twitter where it gets interpreted at true and repeated, is a different complicated problem (and why Twitter is a fundementally terrible design).

But you still have a point in so far as that you can't look at a law ignoring the legal conventions and processes of the environment where "the code is run", something that would be perfectly fine in one environment could be terrible in another.

In German constitution it is Article 5 and it is explicitly limited, considering the importance of the balance. https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/German_Federa...

You're talking about laws, but free speech isn't about laws, it's a notion of moral philosophy.

The sense in which it is foundational is as follows: you cannot have democracy without freedom of speech, because without it there is no free formation of opinions. You can't freedom of association or freedom of assembly without freedom of speech. These latter are interconnected, because an aspect of freedom of assembly is to assemble to hold, for example, political meetings.

I don't know but laws that allow someone to be locked up indefinitely without conviction don't sound like freedom to me.

You might be ok with <your candidate> making speech restrictions.. but are you ok with a hardline opposition candidate doing the same?

2. Governments change

Even a government that starts using a power - say restricting access to bank accounts - for something good like stopping actual terrorism or money laundering can decide to start using it against political movements they don't care for.

3. Governments grow

Governments only grow in power. They get bigger. They use more powers. Even some of the hardcore censor states started with more narrow objectives. China started with objectives to stop false information and external propaganda - now they use that power to suppress victims talking about sexual assault by party members.

Fundamentally I do not trust any government to have that power. It will always be abused, and we must always resist it. Australia is an excellent example of a liberal democracy using safetyism to quickly run towards authoritarianism.

Yes, people can say things that mean. People can say things that are wrong and misleading - and you may even believe them. Everyone has the ability to protect themselves from others speech - stop listening to them. This works even for very small children.

The freedom of speech brings with it the ability to ask for a redress of wrongs. It is how people can talk about alternative candidates. It is the most vital of freedoms because it is the foundation of the others.

Yes, only those are dictators or wannabe dictators... In Democracy they are free to speak, also against Democracy, after they grab power no one are free anymore...

> today USA is deciding to violate right of property for Russian oligarchs because rights of Ukrainian citizen are violated.

Really? Did you look for something more tangible than mass-consumption Bernaysian propaganda? Start with this old governmental (EU) report: https://www.osce.org/files/f/documents/e/7/233896.pdf go to the USA think tanks side like https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html and https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_briefs/R... and also far in the past https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/AERODYNAMIC%20%20%20VOL... who is actually violating what?

> Right for free movement was restricted during Covid pandemic

Witch is another scandal, actually one per WHO pandemic declaration... Again I suggest some official governmental sources one from the last pandemic for instance: https://assembly.coe.int/CommitteeDocs/2010/20100126_Stateme...

Yes, Democratic Civil Rights are regularly violated and they are because that's mean profit for some until the people remember that in Democracy they rule and arise. Only they tend to remember that way too late, when arising it's not just a legal action or a protest but a civil war and they are so easy to influence that's they tend to be quickly steered/diverted.

That's the real issue: how can we have Democracies when we do not have Citizens but only subjects/people? How in the history Democracy happen?

Disagreement with that means you're a threat to democracy, period.

What makes it a democracy is that all members of society participate in that conversation. Freely.

Anything less is mere tyranny.

But if we need a way to manage spam, lies and the other poisonous forms of conversation, then empower the individual to handle that. Because we do not trust you.

I guess the keyword there is „that“, right? Freedom of speech should not be restricted if it helps to support the democracy, but OTHER conversations are different matter. As I said, freedom of speech is not absolute and is checked by other freedoms and rights.

Should we assume that there is an invisible man between us, transforming our words? That seems really bad to me.

Are bot accounts paid for by an external part (e.g. foreign government agency or multinational company), which 24/7 post inflammatory (not illegal) and bad-faith augments (not illegal) in a conversation part of that society?

I think you should rethink your criteria.