If by "western" you meant some other power then you should be specific. Western as a term is imprecise and can be interpreted differently depending on the audience.
Unless I suppose your interpretation of the purge of USAID, etc, by the Trump administration house-clearing a bunch of people because they failed to position assets in Iran. That'd be evidence in favour of them missing the boat on the Iran protests, I suppose. But even then, they've had a few months to get their act together and at least try something.
This is nothing but evidence free speculation. What you’re doing is undermining the validity of the protest movement and parroting the line of the Iranian government. It’s disgusting. Take this shit somewhere else.
It is unfortunate that the US's actions right now undermined whatever validity you feel the protests had. I certainly agree it is disgusting - and also bad for US interests so it is curious why they're doing it. Take it up with them if you have a problem with the idea, I'm not a US general or policy maker.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Israel_war
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_strikes_on_Irani...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_buildup...
[3] https://theconversation.com/how-the-cia-toppled-iranian-demo... / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
Scott Bessent, at the WEF [0], explained that:
> President Trump ordered treasury and our OFAC division, (Office of Foreign Asset Control) to put maximum pressure on Iran, and it’s worked because in December, their economy collapsed, we saw a major bank go under, the central bank has started to print money, there is a dollar shortage, they are not able to get imports and this is why the people took to the streets.
So it is organic insofar as the US is working hard to water and nourish something. This has been a huge push to destabilise and unseat the Iranian regime, the idea that they didn't have some people involved in the protests is hard to countenance. It'd be incompetence of the grossest variety. Technically possible? Yeah. A reasonable prior? No.
[0] https://youtu.be/TieI8GBcwTo?t=1760 & I got that from some random @ https://the307.substack.com/p/scott-bessent-again-boasts-tha... who has other choice quotes.
From my memory (might be mistaken) there have been attempts to somewhat study this via polls etc, and determined that coverage via propaganda (specifically Fox News) is less helpful then randomly guessing what actually happened...
But ymmv, social studies are always hard to trust, because it's borderline impossible to prove cause and effect
Ironically the studies of that nature are often themselves a form of propaganda, because it's entirely straightforward to structure the study to produce your preferred outcome.
There is a well-known human bias where people use information they know to try to guess information they don't. If you're given three random people and the only thing anyone has told you about them is that one is a drug addict and then you're asked to guess which one is a thief, more people are going to guess the drug addict. So now all you have to do is find a situation where the thief isn't actually the drug addict, let the media outlet tell people which one is the drug addict, and you'll have people guessing the wrong answer a higher proportion of the time than they would by choosing at random.
I hope it's not me, whom you responded to, because I cannot fathom how you could've gotten that impression considering my phrasing...what's up with this topic getting so many people with arguing via complete strawmen
Education is as useful as preaching abstinence at horny teenagers instead of providing access to contraceptives
This assumes that a) everyone is the same, and b) education would always work. Matthew Perry explained that this is not the case. Some people respond differently to drugs. Whether these people are educated or not, changes very little. Education helps, but not in the way as to be able to bypass physiological aspects completely.
> Education is as useful as preaching abstinence at horny teenagers instead of providing access to contraceptives
Education can still help. For instance, I decided very early on that the best way to avoid e. g. addiction is to not "give in and try once". So I never tried drugs (ok ok, I did drink a beer occasionally). This was the much simpler and easier strategy to pursue, simply via avoidance behaviour.
Thus I disagree that the premise can be "if educating worked" - people will always respond differently to drugs. And they will have different strategies to cope with something too - some strategies work, others don't work. One can not generalize this.
>If educating people worked there wouldn’t be any [bad stuff]
Education works. It doesn't work perfectly.
Education doesn't cause good choices but it is sometimes correlated to better situations, the difference between the criminals in prison and the ones in the C suite is only education.
If you oppose these speech bans... Why you're as silly as a preacher telling teens not to fuck!
And the failure of education was an intentional feature, not a bug, since the government wants obedient tax cattle that will easily accept their propaganda at elections, not freethinkers that question everything because then they might notice your lies and corruption.
It's like building a backdoor into your system thinking you're the only one who gets to use it for the upper hand, but then throw fits when everyone else is using your backdoors to defeat you.
> It was a 2021 case involving Andy Grote, a local politician, that captured the country's attention. Grote complained about a tweet that called him a "pimmel," a German word for the male anatomy. His complaint triggered a police raid and accusations of excessive censorship by the government.
A police raid for calling a politician a dick. Let it sink.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/germany-online-hate-speech-pros...
It's just one of the sixteen units that prosecute 'hate speech' cases in Germany.
Oh, by the way, the Chancellor himself is calling to demolish online anonymity completely: https://dpa-international.com/politics/urn:newsml:dpa.com:20...
But sure, abuse of power is so rare. Nothing to see here.
> But sure, abuse of power is so rare. Nothing to see here.
This would make your point if those hate speech cases were all the same as your Andy Grote example.
Otherwise it's like pointing at one defendant winning a road traffic law case due to dashcam footage showing the police were making things up, as evidence that all road traffic law prosecutions are abusing power.
The German people elected the parliament. The parliament elected Merz. The margin was narrow, but that was the decision.
You're missing the point. That's exactly how democratic governments cloak fascist behavior everywhere: The punishment IS THE PROCESS.
People in Germany (and the UK and other places) have to self censor because they don't want to be visited by the police and then dragged through courts for months/years, even though it eventually gets thrown out and you get to walk away innocent, you still had to suffer the entire prosecution process, which nobody wants to, so they keep their mouth shut.
The stress toll of having to go through all that annoying grind through the legal system, even though you did nothing wrong and what the government is doing will be considered illegal, is how the government preemptively keeps people in line.
>That was a overall very rarely occurring abuse of power
Very rare?! Unless there's direct consequences with actual punishment on government officials for illegally abusing the legal system on citizens just because they hear stuff they don't like, then they will keep throwing prosecutions at innocent people just to keep them in check since currently they have nothing stopping them from this abuse turning from rare to being the norm.
Just look at any political thread in any social media in German language. There is plenty of criticism or even insults regarding government officials, without them getting raided. It is only extreme cases (often with calls for violence) which trigger LE. So the chilling effect is missing or at least it has little influence.
YES.
But yeah we get it, there's bad censorhip (Iran, China, Russia), and there is the good censorhip, sorry, i meant "protection of children", when it's the EU. :o)
I understand that you're being facetious here, but this is literally true.
Words kill people sometimes, and in the same way that my right to swing my arm stops where your nose begins your right to say whatever you want stops where my safety begins.
Or to rephrase it, nobody can have free speech at all if others are allowed to threaten your health and safety for it, which automatically implies that violent and hateful speech must be curtailed. It is a variation on the paradox of tolerance.
Yes, there is room to debate exactly where the line is, but the fact that there is a line is fairly well settled except amongst the rabid.
Ergo, your words threaten my safety.
The paradox of tolerance is not about censoring others. If anything, censorship lands on the side of the intolerant of this paradox.
But why always the need, on the left, to ban everyone else from doing it because YOU want to do it personally ?
People were sentenced to death at Nuremberg for giving orders, written and spoken.
It's well established in every legal jurisdiction that individuals are responsible for the words they use.
The words the Nazis said were irrelevant. They directed people to kill and as such they were guilty.
I think someone who goes and attacks somebody is guilty. They cannot use the excuse they were following orders. The words didn't take control of them like a spell. They made the conscious choice to commit violence and as such the guilt is on them, not the bat.
>They directed people to kill and as such they were guilty.
I'm glad we finally reached an agreement that people can and should be held criminally responsible for their words.
>They cannot use the excuse they were following orders.
Good, though that's not what was being argued. I think you knew that though.
Yes, words led to that, but the onus of the deaths are on those who did the killing, not the words. Could the Nazis in the Nuremberg trials have used the excuse that it was actually the words doing the killing and as such they were innocent?
If you want to say words kill, in the way you are saying, then words have killed most people that have been killed. If we take an example where somebody gets turned down and then gets killed for it, would you say words killed that person? Should we ban turning people down? You do want words that kill to be banned after all.
I'm reminded of a phrase I leaned as a kid that starts with sticks and stones...
Obscenity in any context - Won't someone not think of the children?
Child sexual abuse material - Fine in the new regime as long as you didn't record it yourself, right?
Incitement to imminent lawless action - You only told them who to murder, right?
True threats and harassment - All those people can just die. Speech is the ONLY freedom that matters. Serious expressions of intent to commit unlawful violence be damned.
Fighting words - Sure - Bait them till they hit you then the cops can come arrest THEM. Aren't you clever! And totally free from consequences for your actions! Ideal!
Defamation - Why CAN'T we just make stuff up about our enemies, friends, and loved ones? Those suckers rights are far less important than ours after all!
Fraud and false commercial speech - All legal now! Finally the freedom to rip off old ladies and the mentally unwell! Thank god for liberty!
IP violations - Again, free speech is absolute now so nobody can own anything that can be conveyed via language. Yay!
Or... we could just be reasonable about it and say that the limit's of free speech are where they start to impinge on other peoples liberties. Your call.
Next, my issue is primarily on your issue with hateful speech, I should have been more clear. I wrote it on my phone and didn't feel like expanding upon what I was trying to say. I should have conveyed my thoughts better.
I will explain my position more clearly.
I think pushing what you are when it comes to hateful speech is dangerous. Using your own logic the comment I am replying to could be illegal. You said "hateful speech must be curtailed". What you said about Elon is clearly derogatory and could easily be considered hateful. If the laws were in place, I think with how petty Elon is, he would go after people who are critical of him like yourself.
Having emotional harm is not really something that can be determined which is the primary harm that hate speech causes. Every person is different so you wouldn't have a way to know what you could say. The only way to know if something is hateful is to ask the person if they were intending it to be hateful or if the recipient found it hateful.
When you have vague terms that could be determined by emotion rather than an objective measure you are going to run into issues. Obviously sometimes there will be subjective measures, but we need to minimize them whenever possible.
If somebody is directing somebody to kill somebody that is causing physical harm towards an individual and should be illegal.
Going back to the world war examples. Hitler would be guilty of directing people to cause physical harm.
If Hitler said to kill somebody I don't consider that to be different than if Hitler just pointed and somebody and then turned his finger into a gun. The issue wasn't what he said or didn't say, it was what he was directing somebody to do.
If Hitler said something like we have economic issues and Jews run the banks, that would probably be considered hateful by many people. I don't think it should be illegal. If Hitler added let's kill the Jews, that would be directing people to commit violence and would not be legal.
Hitler hating the Jews in the first statement doesn't mean he should go to jail. It didn't cause a normal person to go out and commit the Holocaust.
It was from an actual quote of his in which he claimed to be a "free speech absolutist." I did mean it in a derogatory way, because just repeating it makes him seem silly, but it's an actual quote so not slanderous or anything.
That said, I agree that nobody has the right to live a life free of criticism and some folks need thicker skin (including myself from time to time).
>If somebody is directing somebody to kill somebody that is causing physical harm towards an individual and should be illegal
Well there you go. We both agree that some speech has to be illegal, we just disagree as to exactly where that line is. I think it's perfectly reasonable for us to disagree about *exactly* where the line is, as long as everyone understands that there is a line.
To me that line is very simple: My rights end where yours start, and vice versa. As far as I can tell it's the only sensible basis for any kind of society. You can make it more complicated if you want, but the only way to get more "freedom" than with my plan is to take away someone else's and I'm not cool with that.
If you want to censor the internet, claiming it is "to protect the children" is still a much better bet than claiming that it is because free speech causes world wars, if you want my opinion.
It’s taking way too long for normal people to realize they have a stake and imperative to be part of these communities. Speech is shaped here, and many God awful decisions have to be made at scale.
There is no cost to holding the position you stated, and no one wants to get their hand dirty, or see how the sausage is made. You have to regular decide if this comment is actually hate speech, actual debate, or someone “asking questions”. Who knows what the actual false positive/negative rates are.
The sheer amount of filters, regexes and slur lists needed to stay abreast of toxicity and hate speech are absurdism at its best.
Nothing happens without an informed citizenry. The foundations of speech online are collapsing and weak. There need to be more citizen view points from the ground, deciding how they want this domain to operate.
It often doesn't at all, drowned amongst lies.
And sometimes it takes a lifetime or two.
It took Boris Yeltsin, who had just become the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, actually visiting a random grocery store in Houston before he realised what the truth was:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_visit_by_Boris_Yeltsin_to...
This was a communist apparatchik. Its like showing truth to MAGA people. Most wont accept it.
Could be. That was the other example I was considering using besides Yeltsin, but I figured it would immediately get met with "no u" responses from those who, as you say, won't accept it. That makes for boring conversations where I learn nothing.
Even in democratic societies politicians don't change their beliefs so fast (maybe most human?). But luckily we can vote them out so this is not a big problem.
Good luck, Earthlings ...
Yeah I agree, we shouldn't be too concerned about Iran, Russia, or China, censoring the internet, the truth gets through.
"Global tariffs all over the spectrum help the US economy! Look at my Beautiful Big Chart !" ... yeah, right.
Statists, failing to admit their guilt, blame everyone but themselves.
And no, the truth does not get through, even after centuries.
Promoting truth and opposing lies are the same thing.
I wouldn't be so sure. Significant part of Russian population believes that they are purging Ukraine of evil nazis, for example. Or that WW2 started on 22 June 1941.
Everyone starting from school knows that 22 June 1941 The Great Patriotic War began (Великая отечественная война). This is not the beginning of the WW2.
And what is the lie in the fact that Ukraine glorifies nazi criminals? You can see this for yourself.
Everyone can feel censorship, everyone can learn what they're punished for saying.
Propaganda, though, that can feel like learning, like personal growth and development.
If censorship comes with a stick, propaganda is a carrot.
And today, we have as much of a problem with metaphorical obesity as with literal obesity.
One way is simple repetition of the exact same thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect
Another is to have many different lies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_the_zone and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
Taking a step back, there is another way for propaganda to function that doesn't even require being the main source, but simply to make the lie so huge that people can't process the idea someone would be *that* level of dishonest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie
Consider your own previous comment:
> you get one half truth from one source, another half truth from another source, then two halves make whole truth.
What happens when one source says that the Alpha Party* consists of child-eating devil-worshiping lizards from Alpha Ceti 5 who caused the 9/11 attacks to cover up how the mind-control chemtrail fluid they were making in the WTC burned hot enough to melt steel beams, and the other source says the Alpha Party is standing on a platform of reducing the tax burden on hard-working families?
The latter can be a half-truth, but you don't get even a little closer to a full truth by adding any part of the "other side".
* A made-up party, any similarities to actual persons is coincidence and all the usual disclaimer.
They clearly did work, though.
Problem? No, the problem isn't their very happening, it's more that they are effective strategies. Some also used by advertising agencies.
> And the very fact that you know about child-eating devil-worshiping lizards from Alpha Ceti 5 shows that an opinion is available no matter what propaganda you use against it as long as it's not censored.
I don't know anything about child-eating devil-worshiping lizards from Alpha Ceti 5, that doesn't mean I can't talk about them. It's called "making stuff up".
Not sure where you're going with that sentence though. You do realise, I hope, that this was supposed to be a string of nonsense? That the point was that no matter which half you take from a string of nonsense, you can't combine it with a half-truth to get a full truth, you just get a half truth with a different false part.
Which in this example might be something like "the Alpha Party* caused the 9/11 attacks to cover up how the mind-control chemtrail fluid they were making in the WTC burned hot enough to melt steel beams, and wants to reduce the tax burden on families where the parents earn more than double the national average income between them".
The half-truth remains, at best, a half-truth. But that's the best case, and you only get that if you already knew what part was less than honest before you considered what to dismiss, at which point you didn't need anything from other statements in the first place.
> You can suppress it only by censorship, not by propaganda.
That's the point of disagreement: you, as a human, can only pay attention to so much. For example, if I buy all the ad space around you and fill it with only my own message, that is propaganda that denies the same space to anyone who wants to tell the truth.
> In any case using shitposting sites as a source of information is tricky, journalism isn't that bad yet.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/09/25/1-in-5-am...
* A made-up party, any similarities to actual persons is coincidence and all the usual disclaimer etc etc.
No, it's a page out of the old fascist playbook where flooding the stage with propaganda generates enough confusion to help fascists further their hateful agenda.
I'm not sure about modern fascists, but US politics does look rather Kayfabe-y to me. Fake opposition, there for the purpose of being an opponent.
Of course then you get all the discourse about what even counts as fascism, and someone brings up that the origin of the word is the Roman "fasces" (bundle of sticks) and how that etymological root points to the concept of "strength through unity" which is also why the Lincoln memorial has Lincoln resting his hands on them[0] and why trade unions often use the "strength through unity" phrasing (and get annoyed/upset by the connection).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lincoln_Memorial_statue_a...
You can tell they've never read his work because his conclusion in the end is that you should tolerate intolerance up and until it promotes specific violence.
So total freedom of speech up and until it starts inciting violence. It's basically the same stance the US Constitution has.
The world is yet to find a single piece of truth coming out of the Trump administration. I mean, shall we discuss how Trump claims the Epstein files exonerate him when he is reported as directly, deeply, and personally involved in every single gruesome aspect of the criminal organization?
> And truth.
In short, propaganda.
Propaganda (noun): Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is being presented. Propaganda can be found in a wide variety of different contexts.[0]
Preventing non-ideal outcomes is not about lying, but not doing things you might regret in the future.
This is why I'm no politician, though.
There's also debate and ego-less teaching for the sake of truth-seeking.
My ego prefers to be the kind of person who ends up at truth over being one who has fooled themselves into thinking they have already found it, which makes changing my mind easier than others find it.
I am pleased to say, others have also remarked that I am closer to this ideal than others they know.
Yeah, that's what everyone says.
One of my childhood life-lessons, which took far too many examples to internalise, was all the people who are very happy to follow the crowd because it is the crowd.
In fact, what you're doing now suggests my approach is so alien to you that you yourself are right now not only not even telling yourself this but also labelling yourself as someone who does not say this.
Scount mindset: the discovery of the truth to the best of our ability without fear or favour.
The metaphor is: A scout who tells the general his troops are strong when they are weak, that the enemy is weak when it is strong, is a bad scout.
The opposite is a soldier mindset: a soldier who fears to fight when ordered, no matter the strength of the enemy, isn't a good soldier.
You can call the search for truth an agenda in its own right if you wish, but it lacks the "primarily used to influence or persuade" aspect of propaganda.
That's a mind-slave mindset. Why is the scout working for the general and not for himself?
And a general needs the same *mindset*, even if they must also engage in performative ho-rah-ing to the troops.
A general may need to order their troops to die for the greater good, they may need to lie to the troops to up morale, but if a general lets themselves believe they're strong when they're weak, they're bad at being generals. If they don't listen to their scouts, if they shoot the messenger, they're bad at being generals.
https://archive.org/details/AllArtIsPropagandaCriticalEssays...
You're talking about an administration that actively tries to censor candidates of opposition candidates through both state regulatory institutions such as the FCC and business collusion, a typical play out of the fascist playbook with state and oligarchs colluding to strong arm their political goals.
It's also the same administration who is actively involved in supporting other dictatorial regimes and destabilize Europe, including with very explicit and overt threats of war of invasion to annex territories.
It's also the same administration that is clearly a puppet administration controlled by another totalitarian regime - Russia.
There is no soft power in this stunt. Only further self-destructive actions to further kill the US's relevance as an European ally.
Freedom of speech for me, not for thee
The whole truth here would be that technically he did not do it unilaterally but as a representative of his voters, so basically almost as far from unilaterally as possible.
Don’t be obtuse
The president runs VOA, it's not some separate entity he decided to censor.
I still think that soft power helped the US tremendously. For all their faults i really had a very positive view on the US, most of it was coloured through soft power. “Inventing” modern democracy, liberating EU from the nazis, Rock’n’Roll, hippie movement, Hollywood, early internet culture - all that overshadowed the imperialism.
Now the mask has come off. And I believe you are right that it ultimately may not matter too much. But then again I doubt the US will be able to style itself again as the “good guys”, the ones who spread democracy to all the oppressed people and and so on without significant effort.
The United States has nothing now, back to imperialism it seems.
This is only cringy lousy provocation for appearance of moral superiority.
Coming from a government notorious for spying on it's citizens it seems pretty ludicrous.
At the same time, I do not understand how what you wrote is in any way relevant to the topic.
In any case, you’re right. The only concern is that projects like this that start in Europe often end up being acquired by American companies, so I’m worried it could end up the same way.