German Prosecutors Think It’s Funny People’s Homes Are Being Raided And Their Devices Seized Because They Said Stuff On The Internet

ACAB

No matter the country, pigs will be pigs

(correction: they are worse than pigs)

That law is definitely problematic. The phrasing was even back then critizised rightfully as too broad, too open to interpretation. It generates a bad precedent, as it could just as well be used against anti fascism activists once the AFD manages to grab power anywhere.

Now where does that come from? It stemmed from one of those actionism-phases in politics where someone said 'oh there's so much hate on the internet, it inspires hate on the streets, what should we do?'

The backdrop was a consistent uprising in really troubling hate speech on the internet, where people with their clear names called for lynching politicians and their families. The thing is, addressing this would not have required new laws. We would have been fine with someone actually persecuting the laws we already had.

Now the "new law" ofc makes it easier to persecute those criminal cases. But that prosecution still only happens if the police actually stand up to it. Arguments like "insufficient public interest" "insufficient staffing" "that could have been anyone writing this, how should we know that an account named Max Mustermann actually belongs to said Max Mustermann" still give the police in the more right wing states in Eastern Germany easy ways out. If they don't want to prosecute a crime, they will always find a way around it.

With all that being said, I can only concur with observations that this law is only now being discussed in international news as right-wing governments with media ties try to make a bad mood against Germany and influence the upcoming elections. Otherwise the anti-protest laws in the UK that bring climate activists behind bars for peaceful non-violent protests would top those headlines every time.

Tl/DR; yes, that law is shit and good intentions don't help. Police still only prosecute those they want.

Its pretty wild to see a privacy sub defend and agree with this kind of stuff. Shits evil.

Hope y'all remember how we had the propaganda blitz about the made up social credit system in China that everybody in the west was freaking out about. Well, now we can see what that actually looks like in real life.

"You can't take away people's right to be assholes."

• Demolition Man