That still seems somewhat defensible to me; there has to be line somewhere (you probably would want to suspend students advertising crack cocaine use during school, right?). And "I got suspended during school despite doing something that was not literally illegal" is a weak position in the first place IMO.

But police knocking on your door and confiscating your device because you called some politician an "idiot" by posting an online meme seems almost unthinkable in the US, when even the president himself is slinging insults like that at political opponents all the time.

My point is not that there is clear black/white line and the US have free speech and Europe doesn't, just that the free speech/defamation tradeoff is slightly different.

Those, to me, are mainly authoritarian tendencies of the current administration.

That is a different argument: The Trump administration is not really shifting the defamation vs. free speech tradeoff in the US (you could argue that it does, in the opposite direction, by slandering political opponents with insulting nicknames like "crooked Hillary" or "sleepy Joe").

Yes. But there is still a significant difference between some agency snooping around when it shouldn't and police physically taking your things, and exactly that happened both under the current and the previous german administration, just for milquetoasty insults ("idiot" and "<cancellor> suck balls", respectively). Both cases are great examples of the Streisand effect btw, there is even a short film about the first one.

I'm not saying that you can't protest in Germany, just that european free speech/defamation protection tends to lean a bit more against defamation.

You call that a crazy outlier, but under the previous administration some retiree had police knock on his door and confiscate his tablet (!) because he posted a meme calling a member of the green party an "idiot" (Schwachkopf).

Meanwhile, all the counterexamples that people bring up here are strictly tied to the Trump administration.