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0 pointsbertil12y ago0 comments

In all these country, ‘hate speech’ is generally clearly limited to destructive and politically irrelevant things: nostalgics of the Third Reich are illegal out of respect for history, not because the government expects to be over-turned in the short term. Ireland and UK might have some more recent problems with ‘The Troubles’, but both sides can freely exchange political ideas (as long as its not to call for terrorism-grade violence). I’m not seeing Netherlands on that list, but a decade ago, they had an… interesting discussion on what to do with a political party that wanted to abolish sexual majority or ‘specism’ i.e. make pedophilia and bestiality legal. I’m fairly happy under-age children were not meant to have an open access to those arguments to be made believed “this is OK”.

I don’t have a problem with any of these. I have even less a problem when every country on your list has had recent, vivid debate on extreme speeches, and tolerated everything that wasn’t clearly in categories that unambiguously deteriorate political discourse.

I understand that this might shock some Americans who don’t understand it, but the overwhelming majority of Europeans would not even hesitate a second to refuse US-like free speech were anything goes, and Koch brothers finance everything, from blatant hurtful lies, attacks on science and fuel race-hatred.

I fully expect that this comment, like every similar one on Hacker News I made prior, to be heavily down-voted by people who have no issue with the form of what I say (polite, argued and relevant) but disagree with my opinion. Doing so goes against the principles of this forum, and you should be ashamed to think about it.

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gioele12y ago

> In all these country, ‘hate speech’ is generally clearly limited to destructive and politically irrelevant things

Not really, see this example of "law stretching": http://boingboing.net/2011/10/05/italys-insane-internet-law-...

> This proposal, which the Italian Parliament is currently debating, provides, among other things, a requirement to all websites to publish, within 48 hours of the request and without any comment, a correction of any content that the applicant deems detrimental to his/her image.

> Unfortunately, the law does not require an evaluation of the claim by an impartial third judge - the opinion of the person allegedly injured is all that is required, in order to impose such correction to any website.

For a longer list of similar cases, have a look at https://opennet.net/research/regions/europe

> Conclusion: Today, Internet content in Europe is controlled by three groups of factors: region-wide organizations (the EU), individual countries, and companies (e.g., ISPs, search engines). While governments have been extremely active in promoting filtering technologies for child pornography and surveillance technologies for copyright infringement, they are increasingly finding that they can achieve their aims through indirect means. Rather than passing explicit regulations, governments have pressured companies to voluntarily self-regulate content, be it pornography, hate speech, or content that infringes upon copyrights. Such pressures show a creeping tendency toward the second- and third-generation controls found elsewhere.

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