60 Minutes
11 HN mentions · mentioned in 6 months, 2025
13:13 · 536K views · Feb 17, 2025
A 60 Minutes segment on how German prosecutors and police go after online hate speech and insults, which are crimes there. It contrasts this with the broad First Amendment protection of online speech in the US.
HN mostly cites it in unrelated threads as evidence of European speech restrictions, and some commenters call it propaganda.
11 comments from Hacker News
The UK arrested around 12.5k people in 2023 over social media posts, according to the Times. Not all of them related to immigration at all (but I would wager: many are). It is sufficient to 'cause distress' - against whom, or in what form, or what qualifies as 'distress' is deliberately kept vague to maximise persecution rates. Some cases saw a squad car with six Bobbies take the very average, middle-class parents of a teenage daughter to the precinct to question them on why their daughter has had strong opinions on the way her school's new head was chosen [1]. While - as so often - no-one was later sent to a court for sentencing, the chilling effects are there, and I'd say half a platoon of police officers descending on someone's front lawn is definitely "getting in trouble with the law". [1] [LINK] Money quote: > More often than not, the police record these episodes as “non-crime hate incidents”, with over 13,200 recorded last year. What’s so extraordinary about the police’s zealous pursuit of these non-criminals is that the rate at which they’re catching actual criminals is falling. Fewer than seven in 100 crimes now lead to a charge or summons, down from 17 in 100 in 2015. In the year to September 2023, the total number of burglaries left unsolved stood at 213,814, a rise of 4 per cent on the previous year. So ... police gets their numbers up persecuting people for wrong thought while they avoid having to deal with actual, real criminals which might fight back violently.
I'm not the parent, but one reference they made but didn't link was this 60 Minutes clip "Policing the internet in Germany, where hate speech, insults are a crime". It was a bit of a meme in Germany. this video Still, the author of the original article has some pretty polarising and crude views, and I think it's valuable to keep that context in mind. The key is not to be lazy and just dismiss everything that doesn't come from the smoothest PR media personality. For me, it felt like reading a frustrated author arguing against over-reliance on the service sector as an economy, given the dependencies it creates. There is certainly nationalism, realism/geopolitical views and a somewhat raw criticism of the current monetary system in the mix. The author sprinkles a lot of cultural references all over it and concludes with a tongue-in-cheek hint at an accelerationist strategy. .. based on that random blogpost I probably still wouldn't buy any gold just yet.
Germany, where they lock you up for criticizing politicians[1] or where they have a ban against protesting for Palestine because it's "antisemitic"?[2] Or UK where you can get locked up for blasphemy[3] or where they lock up ~30 people a day for saying offensive things online because of their Online Safety Act?[4] Or perhaps Romania where an election that didn't turn out the way the EU elites wanted is overturned based on nebulous (and later proven false) accusation that the election was somehow influenced by a TikTok campaign by the Russians that later turned out to have been funded by a Romanian opposition party.[5] I could go on and on, but unfortunately most other western democracies are just as flawed, if not worse. Hopefully we can all strive for a better future and flush the authoritarians, from all the parties. [1] this video [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5] [LINK]
>US government's openly hostile attitude towards immigrants who simply exercised free speech Source for such claims please? German and UK governments are even more authoritarian on free speech. You can get arrested for a tweet insulting a politician: this video >the US has touted freedom of speech frequently and loudly when chastising autocratic foreign powers So did Germany and Austria and most of western EU. They were buddy-buddy to Putin in the past for their gas, and now they're buddy-buddy with Azerbaijan who's slaughtering Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh because EU needs their gas. [LINK] >to make examples of a handful of legal immigrants Source for such claims please? How many skilled legal immigrants have been deported or subject to illegal government oppression?
If you insist: this video It was pretty heavily debated on r/DE. [LINK] Please tell me how you think this "protect one's honor" law doesn't get abused. Also, an youtuber from my country made a video during the pandemic exposing the mistreatment of seasonal fruit picking workers from my country working in Germany, and the video got blocked in Germany by Youtube, most likely on request by flagging. So do do you expect to learn about censorship of German media if you follow German media which is subject to censorship? Do you realize the irony of it all? Did you ever expect for German media to go out and say "here's how we're censoring you"? Germans are living in Plato's cave allegory and are irate when people call them out for it.