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Guest Post By Colin Cortbus: Angela Merkel‘s Empire of Censorship and Deception

September 21, 2017 by Popehat

Colin Cortbus, who has written here twice before about free speech issues in Germany, returns to discuss recent German censorship measures.

Angela Merkel‘s German government has decided to crush digital freedom of speech to silence opposing voices ahead of an election. The measures taken by the German government have chilling consequences for digital freedom worldwide – and Vladimir Putin‘s regime has already began to copy them.

After over 11 years in power, Germany‘s tired Chancellor Angela Merkel and her coalition partners appear to have panicked that they might underperform in the crucial, upcoming federal election in September.

It is not hard to see why. The circulations of mainstream newspapers, which traditionally mollycuddle the Germany‘s political establishment, have been uniformly falling. The only nationwide papers to make gains in sales at all in the last year were Der Freitag, an outspoken, left-liberal newspaper focused on opinion pieces, and Junge Freiheit, a national-conservative outlet strongly critical of the government. The Junge Freiheit‘s adversarial, if at times deeply disagreeable, reporting has long been a thorn in the side of Germany‘s political elite. Unspurprisingly, the newspaper was unconstitutionally targetted by the state‘s domestic intelligence agencies until 2007. To this day, the taxpayer-funded Federal Agency for Political Education warns the voting public that the paper represents a “key outlet of a radical nationalist opposition, which seeks a fundamental change in the social, political and cultural conditions in Germany“. That is an entirely fair, opinionated criticism of the paper‘s percieved mission if you are a private citizen. But it can hardly be deemed to be an ethically acceptable intervention into the debate when it comes from a publically-funded government agency with a legal duty to maintain “balance and distance pursuant to the rule of law“.

But even such Orwellian methods can‘t put a stop to the fact that increasingly, ordinary people are expressing scepticism towards the Government‘s official narratives – preferably via social media, where they can network more easily with like-minded people, often under the saving cover of anonymity. This makes old-style, brute force legal thuggery quite redundant. The government‘s inquisitorial hirelings might potentially be able to intimidate one or two frightened citizens into silence by threating to take vague, and constitutionally bogus measures; For example, police reportedly opened a “criminal investigation“ for “defamation“ against a speaker at an opposition party campaign rally in December who criticised Angela Merkel as „criminal and insane“. But against an ever-growing, often anonymous, sometimes out-of-control crowd of outspoken netizens, these crude, resource-intensive, individualised tactics are but a bureaucratic drop on the hot stone of popular discontent.

Absent of an easy route to get at the netizens themselves, what the government really needed was a quick way to force social media firms to make their platforms inhospitable environments for critical, dissident expression; But taking action against social media networks did not turn out to be all that easy.

In 2016, prosecutors had to humiliatingly drop a pointless, four month-long investigation into a German Facebook executive. The manager had been bizarrely accused in a citizen‘s criminal complaint of abetting racist incitement by puportedly not deleting hateful comments quickly enough – even though his personal role within the social media company did not actually have anything to do with content control.

But coercively targetting social media companies remained an attractive option for the German government. Outsourcing censorship to privately-owned social media firms presents a neat way to circumvene the high bar of constitutional scrutiny that would apply to the state if it tried to enact such censorship directly.

In this context, a tiny number of largely hard-line pro-Government legislators convened in an almost empty parliamentary chamber, just before the end of the last key pre-election Bundestag sitting, late in June. Without all too much ado, they quickly rubberstamped an ominous sounding law; the Netzwerkdurchstetztungsgesetz, or Network Enforcement Act in English.

On paper, the Network Enforcement Act is supposed to combat the purported dangers of “fake news“ and “hate crime“ on social media, in light of events related to the US presidential election.

But this is a poor, figleaf excuse for one of most Machiavellian anti-free speech laws in the Western world.

Surprisingly, the Network Enforcement Act itself does not create any new speech offences designed to better deal with the incitement of violent racial hatred or the glorification of terrorism. In fact it does not even confine itself improving the technical means to clamp down on such specific speech.

Far rather, it weaponises Germany‘s already wildly overbroad and repressive anti-insult and criminal libel laws, which have been previously highlighted on this website. Under these pre-existing, but often ineffectively or inconsistently enforced laws, truth is no absolute defence and even criticism of long-deceased historical figures can be criminalised.

Pursuant to the Network Enforcement Act, social media companies now face substantial fines of up to 50 million Euros if they fail to delete content that is “obviously illegal“ under these laws within 24 hours of recieving a complaint. The same fines apply if not-so-obviously illegal content is not deleted within one week. Moreover, social media companies are also obliged to respond to requests (possibly for data about allegedly criminal users) from state prosecutors within 48 hours – a fraction of the time it would take a good lawyer to write a letter disputing or refusing any mala fide requests.

German courts take months or years to decide whether or not certain speech counts as criminal libel or insult – and even then they often cannot agree. Social media companies cannot possibly accomplish the same in 7 days, much less 24 hours – and the Network Enforcement Law does not even attempt to define what is meant by an „obviously illegal“ posting that has to be deleted in 24 hours. As a result, social media companies will simply feel forced delete all and any disputed content, amid a flurry of malicious complaints from censorious politicians and businessmen who are keen to stifle criticism and inconvenient election campaigning. No wonder, given that experts estimate the fines and costs in case of non-compliance might set social media providers back by up to 530 million euros in total, annually.

Merkel‘s government knows all this full well. Legal experts have voiced strong criticisms of the Network Enforcement Act at parliamentary hearings. The government has been advised by its very own parliamentary research service that the law is in breach of European Union rules. Experts acting for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, of which Germany is a member, have voiced concern that the law fails to strike an adequate balance when it comes to freedom of expression. David Kaye, the UN special rapporteur for free expression, has pointed out that the „ obligation placed upon private companies to regulate and take down content raises concern with respect to freedom of expression… A prohibition on the dissemination of information based on vague and ambiguous criteria, such as ‘insult‘ or ‘defamation‘ is incompatible with article 19 of the International Convenant on Civil and Political Rights“. Moreover, the UN special rapporteur noted that he was “also concerned at the provisions that mandate the storage and documentation of data concerning violative content and user information related to such content, especially since the judiciary can order that data be revealed. This could undermine the right [of] individuals enjoy to anonymous expression ..“.

When a government is desperate to win an easy election and vindictively crush popular dissent, such fine matters of international human rights law are scarely of any relevance. Merkel and her ministers have not even taken window-dressing steps to ensure the law would eventually withstand legal challenges once it comes into force– or for that matter that compliance would be affordable for social media companies. Even the government‘s official justification for the law – to prevent ‘fake news‘ or ‘hate speech‘ from impacting election campaigns, as purportedly occured in the US, is a dishonest non-sequitor; Although the government has had a rock solid parliamentary majority for years, it only passed this law at a point in time so close to the election that technically, the Network Enforcement Act is extremely unlikely to come into force until a few weeks after the election.

What the law says, and what happens when or if it ever comes into force technically is actually quite arcanely insignificant. The law already achieves its objectives by merely existing as a future prospect; The potential of the government even contemplating enacting the costly, repressive, vastly overbroad act is entirely sufficent for bringing in the sweeping and lawless regime of state-mandated, privately enforced mass digital censorship that the government appears to crave so strongly.

In an effort to avoid endless legal battles, vast administrative efforts and hundreds of millions of euros in administrative costs, social media firms will likely be cowed into deleting controversial, critical content preemptively; Right now, prior to the election or the law coming into force. After all, any profit-oriented private business would want to do everything it could to try to avoid the vastly expensive law entirely. By acting now to show the government that they can do the censorship job themselves, making clear that they are capable of acting informally and directly, that there is no actual need for this meddlesome legal regulation. After all, when the coalition government brought in the law, it explicitly stated that one reason for the purported neccessity of the law was that “too small amounts of illegal content are being deleted“ by social media providers, and that user complaints against illegal content were not being processed by social media providers “immediately and sufficiently“.

Thus, the Network Enforcement Act unleashes an immediate, informal, and ultimately lawless tsunami of content deletion; Content deletion that will be conducted kleptocratically by private businesses out of their sheer need for economic survival, far away from the prying eyes of the public, without even a facade of due process or any means of legal recourse. And as an added bonus for the government, netizens who rely on anonymity right now to freely express their thoughts are also likely to be pressured into silence. However vague, the possibility that someday in the future their user account details could be given to prosecutors in some ominous, ill-considered 48 hour express procedure will now weigh heavy on their fingers as they type.

The result will be a stolen election defined by the voices of a politically well-connected media elite, with debate taking place firmly within the government-dictated boundaries of acceptable expression.

Heated, at times hyberbolic, and yes, occasionally emotionally hurtful grassroots exchanges in the marketplace of ideas are what defines a functioning, open democracy. In Merkel‘s new Germany, free, open debate will only be discernible by its silent absence.

Naturally, Merkel‘s government desperately wants to hide this sore reality from a global public.

Very few contempory authoritarian leaders enjoy the enacting their repressive laws in the light of day. When a global swimming championship came to the Hungarian capital Budapest, wannabe-strongman Victor Orban rushed to take down neo-Soviet style propaganda posters that had previously polluted almost every street with their ugly presence. Evidently, he did not want foreign sports fans to think too much about how his regime uses tax-payer funds to promote its own party political propaganda, all while enacting cheap, nefarious pseudo-laws designed to prevent opposition movements from displaying privately funded anti-corruption messages in public. Turkey‘s dictator Erdogan also loves to distract from his systematic destruction of free speech, Kurdish human rights and religious liberty by ranting about fantastical conspiracies involving Gulenists and supposed Kurdish PKK sympathisers (who are secretly actually linked to “atheist Armenians“, according to one of Erdogan‘s right-hand men). It could just as well be Elvis Presley plotting to silence the prayer call of Ankara minarets with loud country music broadcast from his hideout on Mars via a supersonic hyperloop; Any lie will do as long as it takes the heat away from the crimes Erdogan himself is actually committing.

Germany‘s power-obsessed leadership doesn‘t just want to maintain a bog standard clean reputation. It is actively trying to establish itself on that very special moral throne Trump recently vacated because of his venality and imprudence; That of the leader of the free world. And that requires some very out of the box political reputation management.

So, just hours before the German parliament passed the Network Enforcement Act on the 30th of June, its legislators truimphantly passed a bill introducing equal marriage rights for gay people. Merkel had decided to no longer require lawmakers belonging to her centrist-conservative CDU party to vote against the measures, allowing lawmakers to freely choose how to vote as a matter of personal conscience.

Conveniently, this unexpected decision by Merkel dominated the global and domestic news cycle for days. It made the chancellor a darling of global community. Critical coverage of the Network Enforcement Act was relegated to a minor item in the packed news agenda.

But Merkel‘s decision to hold the marriage equality vote at such a time was not just a cynical attempt to abuse gay people‘s rights as cheap political cover to distract from the introduction of repressive censorship laws. It also represents more widely the hypocritical, stage-managed 'democracy' the government presides over.

Angela Merkel had over 10 years in government to find the time and space to realise that gay equal rights were an issue of conscience, not suited to partisan voting instructions.

Choosing to hold a free vote just before the election doesn‘t appear to represent a genuine change of mind on the issue.

Far-rather, it seems like a deeply utilitarian device to allow Merkel to avoid a humiliating forced concession to her political rivals a few months later; All of Merkel‘s three potential coalition partner parties had included red lines in their manifestos, pledging that they would never enter a coalition with the Merkel‘s centre-right CDU party, if she continued to refuse to introduce gay marriage. Germany‘s proportional electoral system essentially makes coalitions unavoidable. So, come what may, long-overdue marriage equality would have been on the books by the end of the year; But by introducing it this way Merkel could dishonestly soak up some of the international credit, and maybe collect some votes from gullible centre-leftists domestically as well.

And what about the government‘s lawmakers, who ceremoniously gathered together in parliament, voting in favour of gay marriage on account of their ‘conscience‘: Where was this conscience of theirs in the years before? Does it only compassion towards gay peoples‘ civil rights when it is electorally opportune to do so? Did they not think that the equal rights for gay citizens are sufficiently important to merit defying mere partisan voting instructions over?

As Germany has economically boomed under Merkel‘s leadership, social compassion and honesty in the public sphere has reached a record low. Corrupt property developers, ruthless drug dealers, and organised crime are being allowed to take over economically deprived parts of Berlin, Frankfurt, Bremen and Colonoge with impunity, while police simply watch. As Berlin‘s political-corporate elite shops in an ever-growing number of luxury all-organic supermarkets, they cheer on the financial rape of Greece and other Southern European countries by the German-led EU‘s austerity programs; Brutal regimes of cuts and privatisations have left some ordinary, hard-working people in those countries unable to afford even basic essentials such as food and medical care. The supposedly anti-racist, pro-equality mainstream media in Germany outdoes itself day-on-day in finding new, politically-useful ways to implicitly suggest to their readers that ‘lazy‘, ‘heat-dazed‘ Greeks deserve all the degrading austerity they get.

While German authorities dishonestly smear outspoken political rivals as a racist or extremist without due process to shut them up, the government‘s very own Federal Police Agency racially profilies perfectly law-abiding Turkish, Kurdish, Arab and African German citizens with glee; Flagrantly violating the Basic Law‘s protection of equal individual liberty in a desperate but sleek attempt to win over the votes of the very people the government publicly condemns when they speak out. The government that digs up every moral trope in the box to condemn racism when it happens to come from its political opponents on the (far) right is the same one that to this day has never brought to justice the murderers of Laya-Alama Conde, a black man brutally tortured to death by German Police in 2004 in the city of Bremen; A sadistic crime for which cops took 9 years to even apologise for. Evidently, the only kind of xenophobia the current government has ever cared about combatting is the variety that reduces its share of the vote.

Merkel‘s government is taking Germany, and with it the European Union, a step towards the path of Putin, Lugaskenko and Victor Orban. Building an illiberal democracy in Germany risks setting back freedom globally, and emboldens dictators.

Unsurpringly, Vladimir Putin‘s authoritarian United Russia party has already moved to replicate the Network Enforcement Act. In July, it presented an extremely similar draft social media bill in the Russian parliament, the Duma, that even goes as far as explicitly referring to the German law as its inspiration. Proving that imitation is the sincerest flattery, Russian legislators even copied the exact, expedited content deletion timeframe of 24 hours directly from the German government‘s law.

Last 5 posts by Popehat

  • Guest Post By Colin Cortbus: Angela Merkel‘s Empire of Censorship and Deception - September 21st, 2017
  • Germany's Libel Laws: A Threat To Democracy [Guest Post By Colin Cortbus] - April 20th, 2016
  • 2015: Another Bad Year for Blasphemers - December 29th, 2015
  • Scared of Sondheim: A Story About Offense - December 23rd, 2015
  • Turkish President Erdoğan’s Precious (Feelings) - December 4th, 2015
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Filed Under: Effluvia

Comments

  1. Parkhorse says

    September 21, 2017 at 7:50 am

    Not directly related, but this post only shows up on https://www.popehat.com, and not https://popehat.com.

  2. neoteny says

    September 21, 2017 at 9:22 am

    the financial rape of Greece

    From a Greek university professor of economics:

    The Greek Debt Crisis: Origins and Implications

  3. Richard says

    September 21, 2017 at 10:20 am

    @neoteny:

    I understand that it was probably translated from that author's native Greek, and so this is probably not the fault of the writer (unless he translated it himself), but wow, that paper is pretty badly in need of a proofreader.

  4. SlimTim says

    September 21, 2017 at 10:41 am

    What would it take for Facebook to remove themselves from the German government's jurisdiction?

    If they removed all of their employees & servers from Germany and stopped accepting money from German bank accounts, would it be sufficient?

  5. Anselm Lingnau says

    September 21, 2017 at 12:19 pm

    As long as Facebook is available in Germany they will have to comply with German law, so they would have to stop offering Facebook access in Germany altogether to get out from under the “network enforcement act”. Which would make a fairly strong statement since no German politician is likely to want to go down in history as the guy who took Facebook away from its 38 million or so enthusiastic German users – nearly half the total population.
    (Facebook has a fairly minimal presence in Germany as it is. I don't think they actually have servers on German soil, and only a few employees, who deal mostly with advertising.)

  6. Thiem says

    September 21, 2017 at 1:33 pm

    I'm German and many parts of this are quite disingenuous. Example: Junge Freiheit and Freitag might be the only papers growing in circulation, but they are still extremely small papers. Their combined circulation is ~50.000, Germany's biggest weekly has a circulation of 900.000 and there is a Russian language weekly printing 57.000 issues every week. So Freitag and Junge Freiheit aren't really going to massively influence German politics. Like it or not, public opinion in Germany is painfully centrist (in the European sense of centrist).

    I could go on but suffice it to say: Don't let this article be your only source of information about Germany. Do your own research.

    p.s.: It's Netzwerkdurchs(t)etzungsgesetz and Lukashenko.

  7. firehat says

    September 21, 2017 at 6:01 pm

    I, for one, am shocked (SHOCKED!) that Stasi agent Angela Merkel might not be the "leader of the Free World" we were all promised when Trump took office.

  8. Matt says

    September 21, 2017 at 6:44 pm

    Is it just me, or does "Federal Agency for Political Education" sound like something from the old USSR?

  9. jdgalt says

    September 21, 2017 at 7:37 pm

    Most German news sources already deal with Germany's over-restrictive speech laws by not allowing the public to comment on their articles. I predict that those most affected (which will be multinational services such as Facebook) will simply move all their offices outside Germany, and then ignore the law, just as Google left Spain. The moves may not even make any visible difference to Germans who use those sites, except that they may lose any .de domain names.

    Frankly, I'm more concerned with apps such as Gab being effectively blocked by the likes of Google (by exclusion from the Android and Apple app stores). The 8 or so huge multinationals which control most media worldwide, including most Internet providers, are cooperating to impose so-called hate speech rules which effectively ban most non-far-left political speech, and as a (near-)monopoly they are much harder to evade than a government like Germany's. Where are the antitrust cops when we could use them?

  10. c.cat says

    September 21, 2017 at 7:57 pm

    Is it just me, or does "Federal Agency for Political Education" sound like something from the old USSR?

    No, it sounds exactly like the good old Germany, after which the USSR was in many aspects modeled. Putin is not the first Russian leader to copy a German law.

  11. Cromulent Bloviator says

    September 21, 2017 at 10:51 pm

    @toohey: Android allows loading of apps from outside the app store, by Google's design. So there is no "effective" in your "effective."

  12. rotze says

    September 21, 2017 at 11:28 pm

    Thanks for the article, quick correction though, its not the "Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz", it's the "Netzwerkdurchsuchungsgesetz" which translates to something like network-search-law.

    https://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/textarchiv/2017/kw26-de-netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz/513398

    Also there's a typo in NetzwerkdurchsetzTungsgesetz.

    EDIT: Weird, it actually is called Durchsetzungsgesetz, but pretty much all the debate leading up to the law talked about Durchsuchungsgesetz.

    https://www.google.de/search?q=netzwerkdurchsuchungsgesetz

    Nevermind.

  13. Richard Smart says

    September 21, 2017 at 11:43 pm

    From this commentary one might conclude that Germans are basically left-wing liberals fooled by underhand right-wing censorship. Polite skepticism is in order:

    A certain sort of Anglo-Saxon commentator is permanently convinced that Germany is about to fall apart. Witness those American shock jocks ranting about no-go zones in cities whose names they would struggle to spell, let alone find on a map. Or those imaginative British tabloids that routinely suggest the nativist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party will sweep Angela Merkel from power. Witness, too, mainstream commentators who should know better prematurely writing off the chancellor and, effectively, declaring Germany the next domino to fall to the West’s populist wave.

    And Ms Merkel's association with STASI is not something Germans would feel inclined to over-emphasize, given the fantastic proportion of Ossis who were obliged to inform, one way or another.

  14. Anselm Lingnau says

    September 22, 2017 at 12:23 am

    Actually the reason most German newspapers disallow comments has less to do with the deliberate suppression of rational debate but more with the abysmal quality of the comments most articles tend to attract. Even short of free-speech laws, the amount of work that is necessary to remove comments that are simply insulting or do not have anything to do with the article at hand is more than the newspapers have time for.
    If you look at the sheer stupidity, ignorance, rudeness, and vitriol exhibited by the frequenters of any US newspaper comment section, the idea of not allowing comments at all suddenly looks very enticing.

  15. Richard says

    September 22, 2017 at 5:50 am

    The 8 or so huge multinationals which control most media worldwide, including most Internet providers, are cooperating to impose so-called hate speech rules which effectively ban most non-far-left political speech

    …And yet the following people have Twitter accounts:

    Donald Trump
    Sarah Palin
    Reince Priebus
    Sean Spicer
    Steve Bannon
    Most (all?) Republican Representatives and Senators

    Wow, the far-left is pretty crowded these days.

  16. Fasolt says

    September 22, 2017 at 9:37 am

    @Parkhorse:

    I tried both addresses on Chrome, IE, and Firefox. All three browsers showed the Merkel post using either of the addresses.

  17. Colin C. Cortbus says

    September 22, 2017 at 10:35 am

    @firehat
    Let's stick with the facts here.
    There is no evidence whatsoever to substantiate the claim that Angela Merkel was an agent of the Stasi, the totalitarian Soviet Eastern German secret police. Sounds awfully like conspiracy theory fake news to me.
    In fact, recent historical research strongly suggests that Merkel, despite her position as part of the social elite in Soviet-occupied Eastern Germany, was herself actually a victim of Stasi surveillance. http://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/tid-31300/titel-das-leben-der-anderen-angela-merkel-stasi-akte-merkel_aid_994336.html

  18. BadRoad says

    September 22, 2017 at 10:43 am

    Clearly the solution is to write a bot that automatically complains about every social media post made by anyone who voted for this thing.

  19. Jordan says

    September 22, 2017 at 1:12 pm

    @Fasolt

    The post is still missing for me. This is a long-standing problem with Popehat. I know Ken went back and forth with their host for a while on this. Some sort of caching issue.

  20. Mika says

    September 22, 2017 at 2:03 pm

    @Richard:

    I understand that it was probably translated from that author's native Greek, and so this is probably not the fault of the writer (unless he translated it himself), but wow, that paper is pretty badly in need of a proofreader.

    Actually, I think that paper is pretty bog-standard continental english. That's a variety of english which is spoken in continental europe (as opposed to the islands, where irish english and royal english and so on are spoken). It defies many traditions of royal english (or even american english). So, for example, the order of words is largely up to the speaker (germans tend to use german word order, french use french word order and so on) and the use of articles is completely optional (greatly benefitting the russians). Also, commata can be put wherever they would aid comprehension in the view of the writer and any figurative phrase which is common in any european language can be translated word-by-word to continental english.
    One thing, though, is strictly forbidden in continental english: You are not allowed to complain about small errors like orthography or missing verbs or such things. As long as you can understand it, it's good. Please, be considerate and don't hurt nobodies feelings.

    That paper was likely proofread by other people who are fluent in continental english, and they – rightly, I dare say – saw nothing wrong with it.

    Cheers

    Mika

  21. Richard Smart says

    September 22, 2017 at 2:32 pm

    Dear Parkhorse, Fasolt, and Jordan: press Control-F5 to refresh. This is a well-known Cloudflare issue.

  22. Mikee says

    September 22, 2017 at 3:33 pm

    RE: jdgalt

    Frankly, I'm more concerned with apps such as Gab being effectively blocked by the likes of Google (by exclusion from the Android and Apple app stores). The 8 or so huge multinationals which control most media worldwide, including most Internet providers, are cooperating to impose so-called hate speech rules which effectively ban most non-far-left political speech, and as a (near-)monopoly they are much harder to evade than a government like Germany's. Where are the antitrust cops when we could use them?

    So you've never heard of side loading apps?

    https://www.howtogeek.com/313433/how-to-sideload-apps-on-android/

    Google and Apple have no control over what you want to load onto your phone, they only control their app stores. You want Gab on your phone? Download and install it yourself. But that would ruin your fantasy of there being a "(near-)monopoly", wouldn't it?

    The antitrust cops have already been called in, Gab filed a lawsuit against Google. Though legal experts have serious doubts that it will get very far. Your understanding of technical phone activities mirrors your understanding of the law. You don't possess enough facts to have an opinion that even comes close to matching reality.

  23. Colin C. Cortbus says

    September 22, 2017 at 4:01 pm

    @jdgalt You are conflating two totally different issues. If a privately-owned tech company voluntarily decides who to provide or not provide services to, it is usually exercising its freedom of association and not breaking any laws. If a control-freak government uses disproportionate and repressive laws to force private tech companies to delete political speech against their will for the sake of cheap political gain, that violates international human rights law and basic democratic norms .

    Also, if most "non-far-left political speech" is banned on the internet, how come you are still able to spread your views on here?

  24. Jordan says

    September 22, 2017 at 7:33 pm

    @Richard Smart

    Tried it a million times before. Doesn't help.

  25. DanA says

    September 22, 2017 at 8:21 pm

    While I disagree vehemently with the laws in question a lot of this relies on 'logic' that has more in common with the tin foil hat theories it criticizes than actual logic. What is never explained is why Facebook would restrict speech in favour of the Merkel government before the implementation of the law compels them to do so when their doing so would not prevent the law from being implemented nor offer them any personal benefit whatsoever. In fact it would decrease the likelihood that some other, more favourable, coalition would win and rescind or tone down the law. So the theory here is that Facebook will spend vast quantities of money to prop up Merkel in order to ensure that they then have to continue spending vast quantities of money complying with a law they have openly opposed that undermines their network, their business model, and their customer trust (which they only care about in so much as it effects their business model).

  26. Eric Atkinson says

    September 23, 2017 at 2:56 am

    Stasi bitch.

  27. Colin C. Cortbus says

    September 23, 2017 at 6:19 am

    @DanA

    Tinfoil hat logic? Nope.

    Even in the run up to the Network Enforcement Act being voted on by parliament, the German government's heavy handed threats to introduce costly and repressive legislation led to a drastic increase in content deletion rates by social media companies. A European Commission study found that content deletion rates in Germany rose from 52% of content complained about to 9 months ago, to 80% of content complained about in May 2017, just before the law was brought to parliament for rubber-stamping. http://www.zeit.de/2017/26/heiko-maas-netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz-hasskommentare

    Also, most analysts and commentators on German politics are pretty sure that Merkel and the political elite she represents will win another term. So, the idea that there is some other, potentially governing political party coalition in existence that tech companies could hope would scrap the Network Enforcement Act for principled reasons just doesn't make much sense. The only political party in the German Bundestag (parliament) that had the awesome courage to vote against the law en bloc was Die Linke (far-left, socialist opposition political movement): However, they have no realistic chance of forming a government coalition where they are the leading party in the forseeable future.

    It would also be wrong to pin any hopes for improvements in terms of freedom of expression and pluralism on Germany's nascent far-right and right-wing populist opposition movement. While parties like the AFD might genuinely despise Merkel and her specific censorship laws, there is no evidence to suggest that they would, if in power, respect free expression to any greater degree. Trying to outlaw or restrict minarets, the wearing of burqas and the public broadcasting of the Islamic call to prayer would, if enacted, also be in breach of international human rights law and is a severe attack on freedom of expression.

  28. Jon H says

    September 23, 2017 at 3:26 pm

    "an ominous sounding law; the Netzwerkdurchstetztungsgesetz"

    To be fair, a law declaring October to be National Lentil Month would probably sound ominous in German, too.

  29. Docrailgun says

    September 23, 2017 at 5:11 pm

    I don't think this means what you think it means.

    "…one of most Machiavellian …"

  30. Sol says

    September 24, 2017 at 4:12 am

    vague, and constitutionally bogus measures; For example, police reportedly opened a “criminal investigation“ for “defamation“ against a speaker at an opposition party campaign rally

    So, they opened a criminal investigation for defamation, under Germany's criminal defamation laws? Are the scarequotes there because you didn't know Germany had long-standing and not particularly 'constitutionally bogus' laws regarding criminal defamation, or because you did know but assumed your readership wouldn't?

  31. Kyle says

    September 24, 2017 at 8:31 pm

    Love this site, but this is pure garbage. I don't even disagree with what the title implies. But, come on.

  32. Richard says

    September 25, 2017 at 4:09 am

    @Mikee:
    True for Android, but not so much for Apple.

    You can only side-load apps on Apple phones by either jailbreaking the phone and voiding the warranty, or by purchasing a developer license. Neither is as easy as the checkbox-and-download method in Android.

  33. VTC says

    September 25, 2017 at 7:57 am

    The supposedly anti-racist, pro-equality mainstream media in Germany outdoes itself day-on-day in finding new, politically-useful ways to implicitly suggest to their readers that ‘lazy‘, ‘heat-dazed‘ Greeks deserve all the degrading austerity they get.

    The use of quotation marks without citation is dishonest.

  34. Vincent says

    September 25, 2017 at 8:12 am

    I feel like I can't really draw any conclusions from this article. I don't know enough about German society to agree or disagree with the author. There are aspects of German law I do know about and disagree with, such as the broad defamation and hate speech laws, which the conclusions of this article are predicated on, but I'm unsure of whether the premises have a sound link to the conclusion. If I've teased it out successfully, I believe this is the argument:

    P1: Germany has censorious laws that are objectionable
    P2: Angela Merkel has extended and utilized P1 for political gain
    Conclusion: Angela Merkel is a dangerous Orwellian autocrat

    While I agree with P1, P2 is a bit muddled for me. I know that Russian election interference is a genuine concern for Germans and other western countries, and this interference usually takes the form of the dissemination of misinformation. Any attempt to curb this will be difficult without being censorious, which is a conundrum that the U.S. also faces. The angle I prefer is education, but that's difficult to implement quickly without sounding like blatant propaganda (as others have pointed out, an Agency for Political Education sounds like a USSR propaganda machine).

    Of course, it may be true that Angela Merkel is using P1 for both political gain and a genuine concern that German democracy is being undermined. There may be some hypocrisy there, but that may be how she genuinely feels.

    At this point I'm just thinking out loud. I want to give the author the benefit of the doubt but I believe it would be equally ignorant of me to accept his conclusions as to reject them. It concerns me that the article doesn't seem to take an objective stance, and I feel like accepting its conclusions would be to overlook the extremely obvious bias of the author. If any other readers have a more nuanced understanding of modern Germany than I do, I'd be interested in hearing what you have to say about this article. My gut tells me that the author is blending genuine concerns with an attempt to attack a political enemy, but rationally I cannot do anything but suspend belief one way or the other.

  35. Guy who looks things up says

    September 25, 2017 at 12:19 pm

    @jdgalt

    I would love to have you explain how promoting far left political speech would benefit multinational corporations.

  36. Richard Smart says

    September 25, 2017 at 12:39 pm

    Dear Vincent,
    a week ago I posted (above) some links to "The Economist" magazine. I'd point you in that direction but it takes time for posts with embedded links to be 'moderated' and you would have no trouble finding that site. Suffice to say they make similar points in much less circumspect language.

  37. Chaon says

    September 25, 2017 at 6:20 pm

    Kyle is right. This is a crap article.

  38. Richard Smart says

    September 25, 2017 at 7:21 pm

    Dear Chaon and Kyle,
    There's no problem with the article's portrayal of an "Empire of Censorship and Deception". The facts are what they are and the author, Cortbus, does a pretty good job of explication.

    Even so, you are both right in one sense: tying that suffocating empire of censorship specifically to Angela Merkel manages to be dishonest, self-serving, and hypocritical all at once. She might be the Chancellor, but ultimately she is not to blame for such aberrations. They reflect long-standing fears among the German people as a whole that they can not risk actual unbridled freedom of speech, and the funny thing is, many in Europe would agree. Such political choices and attitudes are entirely natural given their ghastly recent history. Even the French, who would never tolerate such restrictions on their own media, quietly avoid criticism.

    The German people as a whole, not Angela Merkel in particular, is responsible for the restrictions complained of, and on the whole Germans still support a very pro-active self-censorship/rejection of hate speech, which I'd wager they will gladly accept and defend against all enemies, foreign or domestic.

  39. Cromulent Bloviator says

    September 26, 2017 at 12:16 am

    For the record, Machiavelli wrote that a Prince who seeks to secure his position should win the love of the people through legitimate good works. He also spends a whole lot of words listing out just about every known category of political plot and scheme and explaining the reasons why they each fail.

    That's what it really says, people. It is even well written and accessible.

  40. Richard Smart says

    September 26, 2017 at 3:22 am

    Dear Cromulent Bloviator:
    But "The Prince", remember, was inspired by the Borgia regimes, and written during a prolonged imprisonment and torture at the hands of the Medici, which would not tend to promote an idealistic world view. So fair is foul and foul is fair in Machiavelli's world.

    Besides "a Prince who seeks to secure his position should win the love of the people through legitimate good works", Machiavelli also wrote on the uses of expedient savagery. His chapter headings to "Il Principe" are particularly edifying:

    Chapter XV Concerning things for which men, and especially princes, are praised or blamed
    Chapter XVI Concerning liberality and meanness
    Chapter XVII Concerning cruelty and clemency, and whether it is better to be loved and feared
    Chapter XVIII Concerning the way in which Princes should keep faith
    Chapter XIX That one should avoid being despised and hated

    …and my favourite: Chapter XXIII How flatterers should be avoided.

    But for sheer blunt descriptive force, try this one for size (I don't have a paperback, but should be findable on Gutenberg): "Description of the methods adopted by the Duke Valentino [Cesare Borgia] when murdering Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da Fermo, the Signor Pagolo, and the Duke di Gravina Orsini [Montefeltro's son]"
    – none of whom met their end with moral fortitude: "[Borgia] led them into a room and caused them to be strangled. Neither of them used words in keeping with their past lives".

    Really, any Machiavelliian work could be a manual for some modern capo di tutti capi.

  41. Peter says

    September 26, 2017 at 3:48 am

    The analysis starts off by mischaracterizing the German government's fears of underperforming in the election, which incidently took place two days ago. Neither Merkel in particular nor the German government in general were worried that the CDU, Merkel's party, and other mainstream political parties, such as the SPD or the Grünen, would underperform in the September 24th election because people were criticising them online and in the newspapers (in the past or in the present). Merkel and the German government were worried about underperforming in this election because a right-wing extremist party — the AfD, whose representatives are often characterized as Nazis by people of vastly differing persuasions — was gaining, and has since secured, significant political ground in a country which has been, politically speaking, largely centrist over the last 60+ years. There is no mention of this in the piece above. Nor is there any mention that there was a worry, justified by the election (as it turns out), that frustrated voters were turning to the right-wing extremist party out of protest; a worry that Nazis might be put in the Bundestag out of protest. This is something that Germany's politicians and citizens alike are still trying to wrap their heads around.

    What is more: right at the beginning of this piece, there is an assumption of a causal connection between newspapers sales and Merkel's worry that her party would underperform. This is an empirical question in need of empirical data, not speculative assumption easily cut down by Occam's razor (i.e., by the fact that the worry of underperformance is due first and foremost to the rise of a right-wing extremist party in Germany). Absent any empirical data, which I am confident does not exist, and a reasonable explanation, which is not offered, this assumption is wildly speculative and confusing: it sets up a causal connection between two things ostensibly not connected with one another. Cherry picking facts and irresponsibly misrepresenting them is not good analysis.

    Other than the two problems mentioned above, this piece is a rhetorical mess and reads, as Lichtenberg once put it, like it was written by somebody who has been hit on the head. On a personal note I wish to say that I am very disappointed in the Popehat bunch that they would let something like this be published on their website, not because I disagree with it, but because it is so blatently confused and irresponsibly selective in its view.

  42. Sol says

    September 26, 2017 at 5:54 am

    @Peter
    I can only assume that Ken's reluctance to screen guest posts for quality and general lack of manipulative, over-sensational bullshit is part of his dedication to the overall principle of free speech. Certainly that seems the only explanation for how a certain previous co-blogger, who we will refer to as… Schm-lark, even if finally evicted, ever got a spot in the first place.

    @Richard Smart
    As an incidental note, while Germany certainly places the most restrictions on speech of what might be considered the 'main' Western nations, virtually every nation on this side of the pond has restrictions on speech far more substantial than those floated by many 'left-wing' American voices. Which is one reason why it's always mildly amusing to see the predictions of dire, dystopian consequences that portions of the American political landscape (including much of the Popehat comment section) assume must automatically follow from the tiniest hints of restriction of free speech.

  43. Sol says

    September 27, 2017 at 9:10 am

    … when I posted my comment of the 26th, 5:54AM US time, directly above this one, there were 33 comments, according to the jump-to text. There are now 43, according to the same text. (I'm not counting them by hand.) Furthermore, comments I don't recognise from the last time I read over the thread have popped up intermittently right back to September 21st. Also, I am absolutely certain there were no comments from Colin Cortbus in the thread previously.

    I assume this is because some people (apparently including the article's own author?!) had their comments hidden until Ken could approve them? And then they pop up as though they were always there, and the rest of us look like jerks for ignoring their points?

    Ken, this is really rather unhelpful.

  44. ben says

    September 27, 2017 at 10:39 am

    @Vincent

    My gut tells me that the author is blending genuine concerns with an attempt to attack a political enemy

    Yeah, there's definitely some spin.

    Zero mention of the ADF while basing a whole argument on the supposed motivations for the establishment's anxiety during this election cycle, is a glaring omission (as another commenter has already pointed out) and a sign that the author of the article hasn't exactly taken a "telling the whole truth" approach to it.

    Another one is that there's no mention of the chief architect & public face of, and driving force behind, the terrible Netzwerkdurchstetztungsgesetz having been Heiko Maas, Minister of Justice and member of the SPD party (social democrats, center-left, the closest thing Germany has to the Democrats in the US).
    Instead, the author finds multiple opportunities to mention Merkel and the CDU by name in association with the new law, and to repeatedly remind readers of their 'centrist-conservative' / 'centre-right' affiliation.

  45. Richard Smart says

    September 27, 2017 at 12:18 pm

    Dear Sol,
    The delay for moderation is due to embedded links and the invidious consequences of allowing just anyone to post just any link.. I'm afraid this is simply the kind of clog on discussion we have to accept these days. I doubt it was Ken who did the moderation. He's a busy man.

  46. Cromulent Bloviator says

    September 27, 2017 at 6:44 pm

    @Richard Smart:

    It is a standard tactic to read out the sections and ignore what he says about the various situations. That's why I pointed out that it is accessible; almost nobody actually reads it. People either read the section titles and turn up their nose, or they get excited that they're going to learn the secret naughty tricks. And then they learn that the plots all fail and throw the book across the room, embarrassed at having believed in the Secret Formula.

    You can point at tone to try to make it still sound bad, but the reality is that he makes no moral or ethical analysis at all and gives a pure realpolitik analysis. All the plots lead to various situations where if you succeed at them, now all your allies are watching their own backs and will turn on you as soon an interesting day arrives. That's what it goes over, again and again; for example, if you come to power within a system that had elected officials and you dismiss them and appoint magistrates, now those magistrates will know that they can't trust you to respect the existing order, they expect you to also replace them if needed, so they'll kiss your ass while plotting against you. They can only ever see the appointment as a stepping stone, you'll never gain loyalty from it. And the way to take the next step will always be to stab you in the back, just as they helped you stab others in the back. People have to love you to be loyal, and you can't win love through plotting and scheming, even if the scheme works.

    My advice, read the book rather than its index.

  47. Richard Smart says

    September 27, 2017 at 7:42 pm

    Dear Cromulent Bloviator,
    There is a reason why "Il Principe" was on the Holy Office's "Index of Prohibited Books". So serious are the consequences for the happiness of peoples that the man's writings deserve blame even were they free of error, which they most certainly are not. I'd also point out that the author of "The Prince" was not himself terribly successful at realpolitik, so a would-be Stalin should be cautious in applying his maxims.

    Thing is, I have both a searchable copy (from Gutenberg) as well as the actual book (Penguin paperback) which I did read, thoroughly, as part of a degree in Modern Languages and Literature. Admittedly this was many decades ago but comparing it with Marriott's translation I don't think it has changed much. I'm a little puzzled why you would think I haven't read the thing. (Also, in class we covered two companion works, "The Art of War" and his "Discourses on Livy", but these we were not required to buy ourselves – we worked from extracts printed off by the lecturer, which I no longer possess).

    The upshot is that I simply can't agree when you declare Machiavelli "makes no moral or ethical analysis at all and gives a pure realpolitik analysis", if only because realpolitik is implicitly a declaration that morality doesn't matter – and that itself is a moral position.

    That said, I'd agree that the man is a subtle reasoner, and not meriting the calumnies heaped on his memory. Part of that is implicit in the title – it deals with autocratic regimes. "The Prince" doesn't much deal with republics except to imply that they are a superior form of government because in principle they need not involve the bloody ruthlessness required of autocrats. The practice, we observe, is different.

  48. Mikee says

    September 28, 2017 at 7:44 am

    @Richard

    1. Jailbreak iPhone
    2. Install the app you want to install
    3. If your phone is damaged simply unjailbreak the phone.
    4. Take phone to Apple for repairs
    5. When you get it back rejailbreak your phone
    6. Reinstall the app you want to install

    It may take a few extra MINUTES, but it's certainly possible and nowhere close to being a difficult barrier. And once again, it ruins the myth that there's a "(near-)monopoly" oppressing Gab.

  49. Richard says

    September 28, 2017 at 10:37 am

    @Mikee:
    I'm not arguing that sideloading apps onto an Apple phone is impossible, or even that it's beyond the abilities of most end-users; there are people out there constantly finding new exploits and developing new tools specifically to put this task within the reach of a typical end-user.

    However, your assertion was that "Google and Apple have no control over what you want to load onto your phone, they only control their app stores."

    With Google/Android, that's true; they build an easy method to bypass their App Store restrictions right into the security settings.

    However, in an iPhone running stock iOS, Apple does have control over what you load onto your phone, and if you want to change that, you have to forcibly take that control back from them, by running software specifically designed to exploit a vulnerability in your phone's firmware and install an unapproved version of the operating system kernel (and thereby violating the EULA and voiding the warranty, if you care about such things).

    So, yes, sure, if you really want to load Gab onto your iPhone, you certainly can. However, it's not because Apple doesn't control the software you put on your iPhone; they do. Instead, it's because people have figured out ways to subvert that control and install the software anyway.

    I totally agree that there isn't "a (near-)monopoly oppressing Gab." However, I'd make that argument on the grounds of "You can just visit the website; your phone has a browser!" rather than "Well, yeah, they try to prohibit you from installing unapproved apps, but you can't stop the signal."

  50. Heresolong says

    October 1, 2017 at 6:36 pm

    they cheer on the financial rape of Greece and other Southern European countries by the German-led EU‘s austerity programs;

    That's one way to interpret the requirement that Greece stop spending money they don't have in order to borrow money from people who don't, I guess.

  51. Cromulent Bloviator says

    October 3, 2017 at 12:00 pm

    Greece: "Stop loaning me money! Rape!"

    Germany: "Woah! You said yes, you said please, you said more. OK, I'll stop. Sorry."

    Greece: "You can't stop! Murderer!"

    If I treated my bank that way, they'd close my account. Greece is too pampered, they should sell off all those daybeds and silver serving trays.

    Herodotus explained the problem long ago; Greece hasn't invaded and conquered Germany yet, so they're not really a viable source of funding to lay around eating grapes.

  52. briefliteraryabandon says

    October 11, 2017 at 9:15 pm

    +1 to Parkhorse's comment. I need to use a "www" to make this article appear on popehat.com.

  53. John Wittle says

    October 16, 2017 at 6:06 pm

    I am not sure where to post this, but to the people having trouble viewing newer articles on popehat:

    you can force the webserver to serve you the most recent version of the page, rather than a months-old cached version, by adding nonsense POST data to the end of the URL. For instance, for me, navigating to https://www.popehat.com/ shows the most recent article as the "trip to the opera" one, but navigating to https://www.popehat.com/?abc shows me the true current page. Unfortunately, then https://www.popehat.com/?abc becomes cached, and so I must use a different junk POST string the next time I wish to view the website. Depending on exactly what's happening with apache, it might even be the case that once one person uses a particular string, that string will now only deliver that particular cached copy of the site to anyone; I sort of suspect this is the case.

    It's an ugly hack, but at least it makes it possible to read new articles when they come out.

  54. David says

    October 16, 2017 at 7:44 pm

    Did a bot write this article specifically to get the "Merkel was stasi" out there?

  55. phhht says

    October 18, 2017 at 6:09 pm

    Is this blog dead?

  56. mass says

    October 19, 2017 at 5:34 pm

    What we need around here are some guest posts to keep things going. Does anybody know somebody who wants to write a guest post?

  57. Cromulent Bloviator says

    October 20, 2017 at 12:58 pm

    @mass, How about a manifesto in defense of ponies, pancakes, and tennis?

  58. andrews says

    October 21, 2017 at 3:54 am

    Is this blog dead?

    Might be. Or, it might be that the owner is tied up in a long-running trial. That sometimes happens to attys and you just have to get used to it.

  59. Latest Anon Poster says

    October 24, 2017 at 11:05 am

    Per TechDirt, some A-US-A signed a subpoena to Twitter and named Ken in the subpoena because it was too much trouble to Google his name and find out if it would be a mistake. He's probably buried making the guy regret he failed to Google Ken's name.

    Oh, the subpoena was over someone tweeting a smiley face to Ken and a few others. Seriously, I'm not kidding on that.

    Head over to tech dirt to check it out (links cause issues with posts sometimes)

  60. Robert What? says

    October 27, 2017 at 11:23 pm

    As an aside, can someone explain to me what's in it for Merkel and her cronies to import millions of African and Arab Muslim migrants? Migrants who have no interest or intention to adapt to Germany, and who are a net drain on government resources? That is what this speech suppression is all about: to stifle criticism of these policies. Does Merkel hate her fellow Germans that much? I don't get it. Can someone 'splain?

  61. Dion Starfire says

    October 29, 2017 at 11:27 pm

    Sorry if this is a bit late to the party, but …

    America solved this problem years ago. One of our laws makes it difficult (if not impossible) to enforce a foreign country's speech laws (through extradition, treaties, etc.) if those laws do not contain an equivalent level of protection for freedom of speech.

    So, if Germany* passes these laws, Google, Facebook, and all the rest can simply close down their German/European* offices and/or holding companies. Then, when Germany* asks the American justice system for cooperation, they'll get the same response Russia or China would get.

    * or any other country that isn't the USA.

Trackbacks

  1. Germany’s Suppression of Free Speech Online | White Sun of the Desert says:
    September 21, 2017 at 7:08 am

    […] don't know how accurate this article on Angela Merkel's clamping down on digital free speech is – perhaps Bloke in Germany […]

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