from Hacker News

Europe’s Free-Speech Apocalypse Is Already Here

by citizensixteen on 3/19/16, 10:04 AM with 3 comments

• by Tomte on 3/19/16, 11:05 AM

  "In October, a judge sentenced a man from northeast Germany to five months’ probation and a 300 euro fine for a Facebook post saying refugees should burn alive or drown in the Mediterranean Sea"

  Sounds reasonable. Inciting violence is illegal in the US as well, by the way.

  It may not be obvious to everyone, but we're seeing a wave of anti-immigrant violence. Just yesterday a court in my region sentenced two men and a woman to up to eight years in prison for throwing a Molotow cocktail in a house where a refugee family was living. Only by chance (the small child slept in his mother's bed that night) was noone killed.

  Don't you think this is just academic, and words don't hurt.

• by Tomte on 3/19/16, 10:46 AM

  "and Germany has extracted commitments from social media companies to summarily expunge anything that smacks of hate speech."

  That's -- at best and very generously speaking -- an inaccurate description