I'm sorry to say, but this is the worst that you've come up with so far. I loved you earlier post on Corona, many of the geography analyses you posted were great reading material. The political analyses are heavily biased by US ideas of what is called free speech. The US free speech, which is often not checked and often fact free, has nothing to do with the European freedom of opinion. I'm very happy that it is illegal to insult people both offline and online. With the US based approach, any sensible discussion culture goes down the drain. Just look at what utter lies famous people in the US get away with. if this minimal research is enough for you to not lie Europe it is fine for me that you stay in a country that is not slowly but very quickly losing all of its democracy.
Comparing the UK with the USSR is completely useless as the data is decades. Also you can only have a lot of expressions the opinions prosecuted if they are already expressed in the first place and made public through social media.
"Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day; the denial slays the life of the people and entombs the hope of the race." —Charles Beadlaugh
Give up your free speech at your peril. Once they are able to silence you, the game is over. The loss of all of your other freedoms will follow shortly after. Anyone that advocates to censor you, or to unmask your anonymity is your adversary. Treat them like one - no matter what else they say.
But why is it so vital and necessary for the combined monolithic apparatus of government, corporations, and NGOs, to brute force censor everyone while decimating the careers and reputations of the dissenters? Here is why:
The reason the First Amendment is prime directive order 1, is because it is the most important freedom we have for the same reason it is the first target an adversary subverts, disrupts, and destroys during a crime, a war, or a takeover—preventing a target from assembling, communicating, and organizing a response to an assault grants an enormous advantage to the aggressors.
"If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter." -Washington
Shame the Rotherham grooming gangs didn't start today, imaging how much longer they could have gotten away with it. Better a thousand kids get diddled than the NPCs lose faith in their elected leaders.
To be sure: you're raising important concerns! Full stop.
But the piece also reads like it was commissioned by JD Vance. As did your recent fear mongering toward Muslim migrants.
And if you can't see that, you're missing a vital element of the current ideological landscape.
These pieces, without broader geopolitical context and—crucially—without sensitivity to how much water they carry for society's *most illiberal* elements, do far more harm than good.
I think your comment is part of the problem in the US. Many of the changes pushed for by Vance, Trump, et al are necessary and required for progress. It's pretty obvious that Trump & pals are not good leaders and are not inspiring positive change. The problem is the opposition, rather than embracing improvement and progress, is opposing any change. "The way things were was great." In that way, they've abdicated leadership and given all the power to Trump & Vance. The culture opposing basic human freedom of expression in both the UK and Germany is startling and disappointing. The powerful approach would be to thank Vance for drawing our attention the problem, and then offer a much better path forward than Vance et al propose.
I see a lot of angry replies and although some of them are not very nuanced I do understand the core issue they are reacting to.
You are adressing a hugely important issue with manu complexities and valid points of discussion, yet the quality of data you are presenting to support your points is far below your usual standard.
Infact more then half of the references and images you added are simply showing content from well known propagandists with clear politicak motives. That is not to say they are wrong by default but posting these people directly without providing and adressing that context is not providing data but just passing on propaganda in its raw form.
For example if you read your passage on the english flag you would feel eightly outraged. But if you click the link you can pretty quickly come to understand that what is going on there is police having to deal with the problem of keeping order in a public space where different activist groups are active. The video posters are clearly there to farm video content. You can still argue they should be allowed to do that there but it is a far cry from the idea that you can't wave the english flag in England. (A full article on the problems with the power and influence of organized activist groups and their conduct in public spaces would be far more interesting)
So while I feel your article doesn't provide data of high quality that support your conclusions I also have some conceptual issue with it.
You are holding Europe to a rather radical american standard of free speech to then conclude europe is "losing" this. It is totally unclear why you think Europe ever had this in the first place. Infact this is an extremely minority view that I think has never actually been upheld in any place in history. Certainly never in europe.
I do agree the american constitution is probably the legal document that comes closest to this ideal. But taking that into account and witnessing the shift in attitude that is happening both in spirit and in practice in the US I would say it makes more sense to say the US is losing this ideal.
You bring up someone like Elon Musk which I feel actually weakens your point tremendously. You seem to take his ramblings about free speech at face value, but if you look at his actions you can clearly see he is not a free speech absolutist in the slightest. He merely abuses the ideal for his own side (It's unclear if it is deliberate or he is merelt delusional)
Worth noting the “30 arrests a day” and 12,000 arrests figure is from a Times report about 2023. Notably, Rishi Sunak was prime minister in 2023, not Keir Starmer!
To be a bit kinder than some of the other commentators, I would say that this is a good starting point for what could be a broader polemic. To be against censorship of any kind is a great premise to apply your analytic scalpel to. What evidence is there indicating that all censorship is bad? what should the limits to free speech be? What is the legitimate role of an official national narrative in creating social cohesion and identity as most countries do impose restrictions? Are people happier and countries more stable if speech is freer?
"Stable" and progress are often in opposition. I like progress. Trump wants stable. Remember Toqueville in "Democracy in America"? It's the chaos that made America great, especially compared to France and its path after its revolution. I don't criticize Tomas for not reviewing all the history on the benefits of freedom of expression. If you are in the US you probably had to encounter the Federalist Papers in your education. #84 is relevant. And, of course, Madison's writings (speeches?) supporting his Bill of Rights.
I live in Germany and personally got multiple emails saying my innocuous reviews of restaurants "it took a long time for the waiter to come" were "defamatory" and that they were removed. Crazy.
Sorry to say but the Germany part is bullshit. You used Grok to verify it, and Grok quotes bild.de. That's not a reliable source.
Bild is widely seen as an unreliable tabloid. Sensationalism first, objective reporting second. It holds the record for reprimands from the German Press Council — repeated violations of journalistic standards, including serious breaches of personal privacy. And the line between news and opinion blurs constantly there, often tipping into campaign journalism for specific political agendas.
Europa.com — what even is that? Looks like a scam site.
Freedom of speech protects you from government censorship. It doesn't grant you the right to use a private company's platform. Google is a private business. It enforces its own terms of service, its own "house rules," often through automated spam filters. You're free to post your opinion elsewhere. Google has no legal obligation to host it.
Michael Shermer? Really?
He's increasingly viewed with criticism — sexual misconduct allegations from multiple women, which badly damaged his standing in the skeptic community. Critics also point to a shift: away from mainstream scientific skepticism, toward polarizing "anti-woke" culture-war content. Add his strong libertarian stance and his willingness to platform fringe figures under the banner of absolute free speech, and a lot of people accuse him of normalizing pseudoscience.
I'm having a hard time reconciling "Sorry to say but the Germany part is bullshit" with personal experience and anecdote. There's been that interesting dance around discussing vs approving of the Nazis & WW2. In the 1970s that was fairly easy to understand and navigate. But the current culture I encounter (among some Germans, not all, of course) that assumes if some expressions are forbidden then the list of forbidden expressions should grow to protect other groups is discouraging. Forbidding certain expressions should be the exception, not the rule.
Fair point about the direction that culture can take — worth talking through on its own. But it's not what I raised.
I criticized the sources: Bild as a citation, Grok quoting Bild, and Europa.com, which looks like a scam site. None of that touched free speech law or German culture more broadly. That's a different conversation, and you've shifted into it here.
Happy to dig into the sources properly if you've got something that holds up better than Bild.de. The broader argument about expanding lists of forbidden expressions doesn't really rescue that specific claim.
As far as I know, nobody has seen Tomas and me in the same room at the same time. So you may be onto something - maybe we are one and the same. But, the simpler explanation is that I've never met Tomas and we've never been in the same room as the same time. That fits my data much better.
I agree with the evidence but you do need to address Karl Poppers paradox of intolerance. This doesn’t justify suppressing rational arguments but you should give a sense of why this started. Infinite free speech leads to society where open revolt and destructive activities can be openly discussed leading to influence and action that in turn leads to violence and intolerance.
How do you see free speech working in the context of social media algorithms? Ie. it's been widely reported that Elon Musk upranked his own tweets and has tried to push the X algorithm to push ideas he likes. Is this still free speech?
You criticise the UK for trying to uprank regulated broadcasters such as the BBC, C4, ITV etc (the last of which, by the way, is a private company) but do you see the same danger in billionaire media owners doing the same both algorithmically and in terms of ownership?
You are bringing Germany in the picture again with something that didn't materialize in the end. By now the draft legislation doesn't have the highly controversial clause in it:
"Nicht durchsetzen konnte Hubertz ihre Idee, Kommunen ein Vorkaufsrecht einzuräumen, wenn ihnen Immobiliengeschäfte von Kriminellen oder Extremisten bekannt werden. Innerhalb der Bundesregierung habe es "vielfältige Einwände" gegeben, deshalb stehe das nun nicht mehr im Entwurf, sagte die Sozialdemokratin."
I'm sorry to say, but this is the worst that you've come up with so far. I loved you earlier post on Corona, many of the geography analyses you posted were great reading material. The political analyses are heavily biased by US ideas of what is called free speech. The US free speech, which is often not checked and often fact free, has nothing to do with the European freedom of opinion. I'm very happy that it is illegal to insult people both offline and online. With the US based approach, any sensible discussion culture goes down the drain. Just look at what utter lies famous people in the US get away with. if this minimal research is enough for you to not lie Europe it is fine for me that you stay in a country that is not slowly but very quickly losing all of its democracy.
Comparing the UK with the USSR is completely useless as the data is decades. Also you can only have a lot of expressions the opinions prosecuted if they are already expressed in the first place and made public through social media.
"I'm very happy that it is illegal to insult people both offline and online."
Yikes.
"Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day; the denial slays the life of the people and entombs the hope of the race." —Charles Beadlaugh
Give up your free speech at your peril. Once they are able to silence you, the game is over. The loss of all of your other freedoms will follow shortly after. Anyone that advocates to censor you, or to unmask your anonymity is your adversary. Treat them like one - no matter what else they say.
But why is it so vital and necessary for the combined monolithic apparatus of government, corporations, and NGOs, to brute force censor everyone while decimating the careers and reputations of the dissenters? Here is why:
The reason the First Amendment is prime directive order 1, is because it is the most important freedom we have for the same reason it is the first target an adversary subverts, disrupts, and destroys during a crime, a war, or a takeover—preventing a target from assembling, communicating, and organizing a response to an assault grants an enormous advantage to the aggressors.
"If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter." -Washington
Shame the Rotherham grooming gangs didn't start today, imaging how much longer they could have gotten away with it. Better a thousand kids get diddled than the NPCs lose faith in their elected leaders.
When will you share a similar post on the USA?
CNN’s new owners. A president extorting bribes from the media. Government searching phones upon entry. The list is endless.
If you refrain from blatantly racist remarks everything is fine in Europe (there are always exceptions)
Being “normal” is by no means a guarantee to stay out of trouble in the USA.
I'm worried about this direction in your writing.
To be sure: you're raising important concerns! Full stop.
But the piece also reads like it was commissioned by JD Vance. As did your recent fear mongering toward Muslim migrants.
And if you can't see that, you're missing a vital element of the current ideological landscape.
These pieces, without broader geopolitical context and—crucially—without sensitivity to how much water they carry for society's *most illiberal* elements, do far more harm than good.
I think your comment is part of the problem in the US. Many of the changes pushed for by Vance, Trump, et al are necessary and required for progress. It's pretty obvious that Trump & pals are not good leaders and are not inspiring positive change. The problem is the opposition, rather than embracing improvement and progress, is opposing any change. "The way things were was great." In that way, they've abdicated leadership and given all the power to Trump & Vance. The culture opposing basic human freedom of expression in both the UK and Germany is startling and disappointing. The powerful approach would be to thank Vance for drawing our attention the problem, and then offer a much better path forward than Vance et al propose.
Moronic indeed. All the LLMs are greatly biased and that is a problem if they are the major source of your writeup.
I see a lot of angry replies and although some of them are not very nuanced I do understand the core issue they are reacting to.
You are adressing a hugely important issue with manu complexities and valid points of discussion, yet the quality of data you are presenting to support your points is far below your usual standard.
Infact more then half of the references and images you added are simply showing content from well known propagandists with clear politicak motives. That is not to say they are wrong by default but posting these people directly without providing and adressing that context is not providing data but just passing on propaganda in its raw form.
For example if you read your passage on the english flag you would feel eightly outraged. But if you click the link you can pretty quickly come to understand that what is going on there is police having to deal with the problem of keeping order in a public space where different activist groups are active. The video posters are clearly there to farm video content. You can still argue they should be allowed to do that there but it is a far cry from the idea that you can't wave the english flag in England. (A full article on the problems with the power and influence of organized activist groups and their conduct in public spaces would be far more interesting)
So while I feel your article doesn't provide data of high quality that support your conclusions I also have some conceptual issue with it.
You are holding Europe to a rather radical american standard of free speech to then conclude europe is "losing" this. It is totally unclear why you think Europe ever had this in the first place. Infact this is an extremely minority view that I think has never actually been upheld in any place in history. Certainly never in europe.
I do agree the american constitution is probably the legal document that comes closest to this ideal. But taking that into account and witnessing the shift in attitude that is happening both in spirit and in practice in the US I would say it makes more sense to say the US is losing this ideal.
You bring up someone like Elon Musk which I feel actually weakens your point tremendously. You seem to take his ramblings about free speech at face value, but if you look at his actions you can clearly see he is not a free speech absolutist in the slightest. He merely abuses the ideal for his own side (It's unclear if it is deliberate or he is merelt delusional)
Worth noting the “30 arrests a day” and 12,000 arrests figure is from a Times report about 2023. Notably, Rishi Sunak was prime minister in 2023, not Keir Starmer!
Whatever. I think you're confusing censorship with curbing hate speech.
What is the difference?
Extremely ill-informed and simplistic.
To be a bit kinder than some of the other commentators, I would say that this is a good starting point for what could be a broader polemic. To be against censorship of any kind is a great premise to apply your analytic scalpel to. What evidence is there indicating that all censorship is bad? what should the limits to free speech be? What is the legitimate role of an official national narrative in creating social cohesion and identity as most countries do impose restrictions? Are people happier and countries more stable if speech is freer?
"Stable" and progress are often in opposition. I like progress. Trump wants stable. Remember Toqueville in "Democracy in America"? It's the chaos that made America great, especially compared to France and its path after its revolution. I don't criticize Tomas for not reviewing all the history on the benefits of freedom of expression. If you are in the US you probably had to encounter the Federalist Papers in your education. #84 is relevant. And, of course, Madison's writings (speeches?) supporting his Bill of Rights.
I live in Germany and personally got multiple emails saying my innocuous reviews of restaurants "it took a long time for the waiter to come" were "defamatory" and that they were removed. Crazy.
Sorry to say but the Germany part is bullshit. You used Grok to verify it, and Grok quotes bild.de. That's not a reliable source.
Bild is widely seen as an unreliable tabloid. Sensationalism first, objective reporting second. It holds the record for reprimands from the German Press Council — repeated violations of journalistic standards, including serious breaches of personal privacy. And the line between news and opinion blurs constantly there, often tipping into campaign journalism for specific political agendas.
Europa.com — what even is that? Looks like a scam site.
Freedom of speech protects you from government censorship. It doesn't grant you the right to use a private company's platform. Google is a private business. It enforces its own terms of service, its own "house rules," often through automated spam filters. You're free to post your opinion elsewhere. Google has no legal obligation to host it.
Michael Shermer? Really?
He's increasingly viewed with criticism — sexual misconduct allegations from multiple women, which badly damaged his standing in the skeptic community. Critics also point to a shift: away from mainstream scientific skepticism, toward polarizing "anti-woke" culture-war content. Add his strong libertarian stance and his willingness to platform fringe figures under the banner of absolute free speech, and a lot of people accuse him of normalizing pseudoscience.
I'm having a hard time reconciling "Sorry to say but the Germany part is bullshit" with personal experience and anecdote. There's been that interesting dance around discussing vs approving of the Nazis & WW2. In the 1970s that was fairly easy to understand and navigate. But the current culture I encounter (among some Germans, not all, of course) that assumes if some expressions are forbidden then the list of forbidden expressions should grow to protect other groups is discouraging. Forbidding certain expressions should be the exception, not the rule.
Fair point about the direction that culture can take — worth talking through on its own. But it's not what I raised.
I criticized the sources: Bild as a citation, Grok quoting Bild, and Europa.com, which looks like a scam site. None of that touched free speech law or German culture more broadly. That's a different conversation, and you've shifted into it here.
Happy to dig into the sources properly if you've got something that holds up better than Bild.de. The broader argument about expanding lists of forbidden expressions doesn't really rescue that specific claim.
Understood. I don't read Bild, for obvious reasons. My comment was really about personal experience and anecdote, which may not be representative. I do read missives from FIRE.org, though. This is an interesting series: https://www.fire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/would-censorship-have-stopped-rise-nazis-part-16-answers. This is a more recent article, https://www.fire.org/news/blogs/free-speech-dispatch/will-germany-amend-one-its-most-censorial-laws . Those do not contradict my personal experience. So I guess all I can say is, I have other reasons to agree with Tomas, even though Bild was a source of his. Whether my personal observation is significant or not, my experience aligns with Tomas' claim that "The UK, Europe, and Canada Are Losing Freedom of Speech" (I don't know anything about Canada.)
Maybe because you are Tomas?
As far as I know, nobody has seen Tomas and me in the same room at the same time. So you may be onto something - maybe we are one and the same. But, the simpler explanation is that I've never met Tomas and we've never been in the same room as the same time. That fits my data much better.
Occam's razor, cited by a guy defending his own alibi. Suspicious.
You're both good writers, though.
“ waaah …I can't threaten someone or call for violence against a race like I used too”.
I agree with the evidence but you do need to address Karl Poppers paradox of intolerance. This doesn’t justify suppressing rational arguments but you should give a sense of why this started. Infinite free speech leads to society where open revolt and destructive activities can be openly discussed leading to influence and action that in turn leads to violence and intolerance.
Moronic crap. Stay on Twitter
How do you see free speech working in the context of social media algorithms? Ie. it's been widely reported that Elon Musk upranked his own tweets and has tried to push the X algorithm to push ideas he likes. Is this still free speech?
You criticise the UK for trying to uprank regulated broadcasters such as the BBC, C4, ITV etc (the last of which, by the way, is a private company) but do you see the same danger in billionaire media owners doing the same both algorithmically and in terms of ownership?
widely reported by "experts"? lol
You are bringing Germany in the picture again with something that didn't materialize in the end. By now the draft legislation doesn't have the highly controversial clause in it:
"Nicht durchsetzen konnte Hubertz ihre Idee, Kommunen ein Vorkaufsrecht einzuräumen, wenn ihnen Immobiliengeschäfte von Kriminellen oder Extremisten bekannt werden. Innerhalb der Bundesregierung habe es "vielfältige Einwände" gegeben, deshalb stehe das nun nicht mehr im Entwurf, sagte die Sozialdemokratin."
(Source: dpa-AFX via Deutsche Börse AG - https://live.deutsche-boerse.com/nachrichten/ROUNDUP-Vorfahrt-fuer-Wohnungsbau-Kabinett-beschliesst-Baugesetz-a8b691af-ab20-41d6-805b-503bec6a1b58)