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How is Germany bad for free privacy or speech? Any location out of easy reach for China and the NSA is a plus for me.


Because it doesn't have free speech. You can't even make nazi jokes or say stuff that could be considered racist, xenophobic or disgusting in general.


Does anywhere have completely free speech? The U.S. has a whole host of limitations on it[0], despite it being protected by the First Amendment, as does every country I can think of.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...


Completely free, no. But there are substantial differences. The limitations in US are far less than any other developed country, particularly when you account for the process (e.g. standard of scrutiny necessary to overcome 1A protection in court). This is especially true when it comes to political speech, which is considered to be the prime target for 1A protection.

In Germany, whole categories of political speech are explicitly censored, and I'm not even talking about stuff like Holocaust denial. For example, a party can be banned for having a platform that contradicts "liberal democratic basic order". And even informal networks of people can be categorized as "associations" and banned in this manner.


that's a fine line between liberal free speech (where you have to stick to facts and are hold accountable by the society if you actively are undermining its foundations) and libertarian free spech (where there is no society)


Personally I prefer to distinguish between freedom of opinion and freedom of speech (the former is what is closer to what the german constitution actually says in german, to some degree). It's more explicit about what I think should be the standard instead of total free speech.

So in that view, yeah, my country doesn't have free speech. We have free opinions.




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