[touwer]

It's not sad. It's smart to ban hate speech, blatant lies and things like that. We know, we had the Nazis. Seems the US still has to learn a lesson or two, considering the current political situation. Hope it will not be as bad

[dmitrygr]

> It's smart to ban hate speech

Everyone has their own idea what hate is. For me: it is anyone saying any word with “a” in it. Better stay quiet, or it is hate speech.

[Epa095]

In general the justice system don't care much what your idea of the law is.

If its not clear through the actuall law or the accompanying comments what constitutes hate speech, it will be cleared up by the court itself.

[stinkbeetle]

Is calling people nazis hate speech?

[calmworm]

A rose by any other name…

[generic92034]

It depends. One prominent figure of the right-wing populist party AfD in Germany has been called a Nazi. When he sued the originator the court decided that, considering the circumstances, was not an insult in the sense of the law.

[roenxi]

> It's not sad. It's smart to ban hate speech, blatant lies and things like that.

Blatant lies have to be legal. Firstly because it isn't philosophically possible to tell if someone is lying, it can only ever be strongly suspected. Secondly because it is a bog-standard authoritarian tactic to accuse someone of telling a blatant lie and shut them down for challenging the authoritarians.

Banning "blatant lies" is pretty much a textbook tell that somewhere is in political trouble and descending into either a bad case of group-think in the political community or authoritarianism. The belief that it is even possible to ban blatant lies is, if it has taken root, itself a lie people tell themselves when they can't handle the fact that some of the things they believe and know are true, aren't.

[bitcurious]

>We know, we had the Nazis.

Yes, I keep thinking about the bastion of free speech that gave birth to the Nazi movement. If only the Weimar Republic had anti-hate speech laws, perhaps the Shoah could have been avoided? Oops, turns out it did have those laws, and those very laws were subverted to suppress dissent.

[joelwilliamson]

I think tourer was arguing that the Nazis were a template for how to use speech restrictions to maintain power.

[fungi]

Banning Nazi and ISIS propaganda doesn't and hasn't negativity affected anyone but Nazis and Jihadists. It's just plain good policy.

I guess that's why arguments against it always fall back on straw men and hypothetical slippery slopes.

There are plenty of actual things that do negatively affect societies free speech but this isn't even close to one of them.

[theandrewbailey]

"There is no time in history where the people censoring speech were the good guys."

- RFK Jr.

[LAC-Tech]

This argument has always struck me as ridiculous. You think if only the Weimar Republic had had Hate Speech laws everything would have been fine?

[perching_aix]

Right, I guess the people there just magically all woke up one day hating the jews and voting in Hitler. Crazy how that happens. Why do political factions even spend money on campaigning? Those silly geese.