Loading…
8
TIL a German meme page got shut down over one cartoon, and it changed how I see our 'free speech' here
I always figured other countries just had stricter rules on paper, but seeing a page with 40k followers vanish overnight in Berlin for a single drawing made it feel real. Has anyone else followed a case like this where the ban hit way harder than you expected?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
morgan3165d ago
The part about it being banned "for a single drawing" is where I'd push back a bit, because that's usually not how these cases actually work. In Germany the law that gets used here is section 86a of the criminal code, and it's not really about the drawing itself, it's about whether the image shows Nazi symbols like swastikas or SS runes. That stuff is flat out illegal there, no gray area, and it's been that way since the 1945. So a page with 40k followers probably didn't get shut down over one random cartoon, it likely got reported a bunch of times and the platform acted once a specific post crossed that legal line. The reason it feels so shocking to us is that we're used to the First Amendment, where even the most awful speech is mostly protected unless it's a direct threat. Germany went the other way on purpose after the war, they decided some speech is too dangerous to allow at all.
6