> There are few unicorns in Europe, alas, and too little innovation.
There is most definitely innovation in Europe. It just gets bought by the US, who is quick to forget where the technology came from.
As for unicorns and trillion dollars companies... some may say it's a feature, not a bug. It's great to claim to have free speech and competition, but when a few people own a few big monopolies and control the media, is it real? Regulations are not bad.
Exactly, regulation benefits the consumers by allowing for a competitive playing field on innovation, cost and labour.
Deregulate the market and you get the oligopoly US of today (not the "great" version of the 1950s that had regulation which distributed the wealth much more equally).
Regulations in Europe also seem to have had the, I'm assuming completely unintentional, side effect of completely cementing the positions of the top of society in place. And this is nothing new, this actually predates modern democracy in Europe. It's been that way for centuries. In Europe the only time to leave, or join, the ultra-rich is during wars.
That the EU doesn't have unicorns is not an accident of whatever rules you like or dislike, it's entirely by design.
Regulations are complicated and a double edge sword, they inevitably introduce inefficiency and barriers, so the payoff needs to be greater.
For example, regulations about mandating companies to delete your data - wonderful. A great win for California which is otherwise quite an overregulated states.
On the flip side, in the UK, you may need a license for that television, or a license for that knife. That's the political thing with regulations. If a politician says "regulations sucks" most would tend to agree as far as that TV license, or getting a permit for a particular fence.
Some regulations spit in the face of logic. It's as if the legislators said, "let's make being sick illegal! Checkmate, modern medicine, now everyone is healthy!" Such style of thinking is erosive of trust towards the political establishment and government.
The right wing propagandist who photoshopped "I hate free speech" over Nancy Faeser standing at a Holocaust memorial and holding a sign with the Text: "We remember"? I guess it is kinda important to not ignore the context of the edited image, especially since Germany for good reasons is not including the rights of holocaust deniers and Nazis in their free speech.
Quite a singular case and it sparked a huge controversy on free speech in Germany, with most scholars and officials siding with the sentiment that what David Bendels did was disguisting, but probably covered by free speech to some degree.
Compared to the free speech violations (and the seemingly inconsequencial nature of the discussions after they happened) this is still just a singular case.
Also, purely from a conceptual standpoint I do not think that a free society has to tolerate every opinion of people who objctively seek to abolish it. If you have a significant fascist movement in your country your speech will have become less free, so limiting their speech before they do is an act of defending democracy and everybody who believes in it.
Just replace Nazis/fascists with radical islamists and check how free your speech really is.
There were quite a few unicorns that (until now) quickly moved to establish a US foothold and hired some of their new C-levels there, because that's where the lobbying and money typically are.
Europe tends to have more established, "old" companies that do their own bit of innovation, and a few outliers like ASML that are crucial to many industries (besides silicon, there's pharma, media, retail, and of course a lot of manufacturing, each with their own innovation ecosystems, because many established companies have long figured out that it would be easier to sponsor local startups and then incorporate them than rebuild their orgs at random).
I've just realized that this describes almost half of my career: ten years at a UK startup that almost immediately set itself up with a Delaware corp and a San Francisco office, so it could eventually sell out to Cadence; then several more years at a UK university chip design spinoff that also got bought out by a US multinational.
Hard to compete with the power of the dollar. I guess the Trump plan to push the value of the dollar down may finally make US acquisitions of European companies impossible and US salaries uncompetitive.
I don't think that unicorns, which tend to have a quasi-monopolistic position in their market segment, are healthy for society, or even for the economy (in the long run), vs many smaller companies.
So I see this as a good thing. The problem is that the draw of unicorns in the US does create a brain drain for those attracted by the prospect of becoming rich.
It's quite difficult to become rich in Europe, compared to the US. It's mostly "old money" that's passed down. But you can be successful and comfortable. Is it important to be "rich"?
> As for unicorns and trillion dollars companies... some may say it's a feature, not a bug
Cope much?
As a European I'd rather not have half of our industries critically depend on AWS and Microsoft, especially now that the US has fully embraced governance by RNG. The choice isn't having or not having your own digital infrastructure, it's either having your own or having to depend on someone else.
To be fair, this doesn't really require these sorts of trillion euro unicorns to achieve, although it really is sad to see our industries be reliant on a regime that may turn hostile at the drop of a hat.
We need to do better, but it should probably be done in our own terms.
As a Microsoft employee who spent 25 years in telco before joining and was very much into the enterprise hosting scene, let me tell you that nobody in Europe was/is able to build comparable infrastructure and managed services.
Telcos sunk a considerable amount of money into building hosting facilities but could not deliver the same scale, international coverage and breadth of features that AWS could, so when Azure came around a lot of telco and datacenter people jumped ship.
Since then (it's been ten years for me) I've seen dozens of EU hosters consistently fail to add the kind of enterprise and security features that hyperscalers provide, and that IT departments _need_ for compliance purposes (Google is still catching up on some of those).
It's not about hosting VMs anymore or having Kubernetes for your startup, it's about the whole enchilada (auditing processes, distributed datacenters, management APIs, development ecosystem, etc.), and not even major hosting providers (some of which, by the way, were almost completely reliant on VMware...) can actually deliver.
And the same goes triple for all of the EU-sponsored/state-sponsored initiatives for datacenter creation/public cloud services/etc.
Hertzer in Europe is pretty good, but they don't have first mover advantage and they haven't got as much control of mindshare in governments. A lot of people only discovered their existence once the US went to the dark side.
Yes, I agree: unicorns are, by and large, a failure of capitalism, not an example of success. They result from a system that doesn't value competition but values winning.
That's not to say that the European tech sector is doing fantastically. Still, as an end user, I'd rather have a thousand companies like Proton, Filen, Tutanota, Tresorit, Infomaniak, or DeepL than one Google.
There's no risk capital. There's no vision. No guts, no glory. Just old glory.
A bunch of scared real-estate investors and pension funds who have their roots in STAYING in Europe when the (ad)venturers went overseas and built what has become the US.
Hehe, that's certainly one way of looking at it. Just as well we could say that the religious fanatics, the absolutists, the utopians, and some other malcontents dissatisfied with the enlightenment went overseas to establish their puritan and perfect societies because those boring Europeans just wouldn't see the light and all the violence did not change that.
Would that be more accurate? No, but no less either.
> The boring processes of rule by consensus can slow the EU to a crawl: it took four days and four nights of haggling to agree on the bloc’s latest seven-year budget, in 2020.
That's a weird complaint. 27 member states, manage to agree on a seven year budget, in less than a week. That's seems alright to me. I get that there have been weeks if not months of work done by bureaucrats leading up to that week, but still, seems reasonably fast.
Yes, it was a bad example. But the underlying issue is very real, in that many important decisions are made with unanimous votes. Which puts the entire EU at the whims of any single country, which could even be compromised by Putin (cough Orban). More decisions should be moved to qualified majority voting.
Oh, and the EU should PRONTO implement the suggestions in the 2024 Draghi and Letta reports.
- You can absolutely get in trouble for voicing political speech in Europe. We've seen plenty of headlines of people who got fired in Europe for making offensive statements. In the UK in particular criticizing the wealthy is extremely dangerous because of slander laws.
- Europe absolutely does not have an extremely generous immigration policy. An estimated 24,000 immigrants have died trying to cross the Mediterranean. And this is because of European policy. It's because Europe refuses to honor refugee/asylum claims at the airport desperate people are forced to cross the sea in rickety dinghies.
- Europe does not track wealth of its citizens. Many companies are privately held. Many assets are held overseas. So how does the Economist know wealth inequality is low? But it is known that every time a heat wave hits Europe many elderly die because they can't afford to cool their home.
- “Nobody in Europe is even casually implying they will invade other countries.” Did the Economist forget that European soldiers actually joined the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq? Europe also used its military to topple the Gaddafi government in Libya. Europe doesn't just talk about invading other countries, it actually has invaded other countries in recent history. Must be amnesia! (You might believe these invasions were morally justified, but that's beside the point.)
- It's true that Europe does not have out of control tech execs who boast about throwing bits of Europe into the wood chipper. But this is because Europe's entirely depends on the US for tech and we don't have any oddball "founder CEO" types. There is no European Bezos, Gates, Jobs, or Musk. CEOs in Europe are professional managers. It's not the same.
The article isn't horrible, but it makes way too many claims that don't hold up to slight scrutiny.
Afghanistan invasion was America invading Afhanistan and using NATO article 5 to force Europe into it with them.
Funny how now an American is somehow trying to blame Europe for it while America is acting like a victim because they were not sole benefactors of the alliance.
1. Europe joined the US willingly in the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. Even with article 5 NATO countries could have protested against it or provided minimal non-combat support.
2. This isn't about blame or NATO or ethics. This is about the Economist rewriting history.
> Yet to many Europeans the idea that free expression is under threat seems odd. Europeans can say almost anything they want, both in theory and in practice.
A journalist in Germany was just sentenced to seven months for posting a meme of a politician where she holds up a sign saying "I hate free speech".
Seven months for that seems insane to me. It looks far more like a meme/satire than an attempt to create a realistic fake, given it's just pure-black impact font and an implausible message ("I hate freedom of speech!") to be holding up on a sign.
That decision might be overturned later, I'd also consider it very questionable. It's in a weird space as it was about libel, but based on edited text in a photo like often used for memes. I think that decision is wrong based on what I know about it, it should be clear enough that this is not a direct quote.
Not defending this specific decision, but you can find individual cases like this in the US as well. Overall the laws in Germany are somewhat more restrictive in certain areas, but I don't think that fundamentally affects free speech.
And Germany has taken its stance on Gaza to extreme levels, where publicly defending Palestine's right to exist can cause you to lose your visa. So yeah, things could be better in the free speech area.
> And Germany has taken its stance on Gaza to extreme levels, where publicly defending Palestine's right to exist can cause you to lose your visa
In practice, even on this website, I have great difficulty figuring out how to phrase anything I want to say on Palestine and Israel in a way that's not likely to induce vitriol.
Hmm, I've just noticed something: you say "Germany", but some of the news I've been seeing from the USA is people losing their visas by supporting Palestine…
This is going to be the whataboutery Olympics, isn't it.
That particular case seems egregious, especially the jail part (edit: oh, it's a suspended sentence, so zero jail time). On the other hand a world where news organizations can just photoshop any sign onto any politician and claim they support whatever doesn't seem great either.
But neither does using ICE to snatch people off the streets for making social media posts. (Someone will reply to this with some variant of "oh, but they're immigrants, they don't deserve the freedom to criticize the US", and then we're back at the whataboutery Olympics)
Perhaps it's only worth getting worked up about free speech when the speech is true, authentic and accurate?
(epilogue: this whole topic was at the top of HN for about a minute before it got flagged off, lol)
That last paragraph is nicely stated. I’m going to borrow it.
All societies regulate speech. There is no such thing as free speech in the literal/absolute sense of the word. Probably every society has an instance that someone can point to as stifling speech. Your phrasing succinctly gets to the crux of the matter.
> The court concluded that Bendels had altered the lettering and deliberately created the impression that the Interior Minister had made a corresponding statement on freedom of expression.
> [...]
> What is left unmentioned, however, is that the trial only took place because Bendels previously refused to pay a fine of 210 daily rates imposed by the same district court in November.
So I don't see "sentenced to seven months for posting a meme of a politician where she holds up a sign saying 'I hate free speech'".
What I see is "mislead people into thinking the politician said something she did not, and then refused to pay the fine imposed by the court".
I for one am pretty happy every law that curbs racism. It has worked great so far. The people that play victim are just cosplaying and looking for attention.
German politicians are known for lodging countless complaints for the slightest insults online. [0]
The 60 minutes segment was also quite revealing of the (in my opinion, poor) state of free speech in Germany. [1]
As Bill Maher said, "Germany is so afraid to look like their Nazi past, that they're knocking on people's doors, taking people's phones and computers if you insult people online."
It's a defamation case. Journalist David Bendels posted a doctored picture of politician Nancy Faeser holding up a sign saying, "Ich hasse die Meinungsfreiheit" ("I hate freedom of speech"). Faeser filed criminal charges against Bendels for "üble Nachrede und Verleumdung" (defamation).
Bendels was sentenced to a 7 months suspended sentence and a fine of 1500 Euros, has to remove the image and apologize to Faeser. Bendels will appeal the decision.
I'm going to guess that this will be overturned on appeal. Every country has stupid courts that make bad decisions. I think this is kind of an edge case between satire and defamation, since Bendels is ostensibly a real journalist who reports on real facts—it seems odd to me that he would publish doctored pictures. Still, I think this will lean towards satire in the end, since I don't think most reasonable people would assume the picture of Faeser was real.
The Online Safety Act in the UK has been discussed here before and it is part of a general trend to prevent "harmful" speech including specifically "legal but harmful speech".
The land of the free which wants to force companies to install a mandatory on-device scanning of your communication? The land of the free which wants to break end to end encryption and allow the government to spy on you? We have wildly different definitions of "free".
> To be fair, it's only in discussions now, it hasn't been voted AFAIK and it hasn't been implemented.
Correct but ChatControl now has a majority among EU Commissioners. The fact that something like this is even proposed in the "free" land and the people responsible not laughed out of the room is sickening.
> Compare that to the NSA... ever heard of Snowden?
Europe is not a single country. Some of them are more free then others. For example: Germany monitors all of your internet traffic and can give you fines over it. classifying a panopticon as "free" is insane.
> "Europeans can say almost anything they want, both in theory and in practice."
David Bendels has been threatened with prison time and sentenced to seven months of probation for a Twitter meme [0]. It is the harshest sentence ever handed down to a journalist for a speech crime in the Federal Republic of Germany.
This is the tweet, poking fun at the German minister of the interior Nancy Faeser (the sign says "I hate free speech"):
If grandma can't tell that the picture is edited, then it's no longer a meme, it's slander.
The comedic value would be even higher if it was an obvious tongue-in-cheek edit. Given it's professionally and seamlessly edited, then it's too ambiguous to be a meme and thus should not be protected as free speech.
If you think the standard for free speech should be delineated by what the most clueless members of society can grasp, then you're effectively anti free speech.
He claims it was poking fun. The court found differently.
> Bendels claimed the meme, posted by his newspaper's X account, was satirical.
> But the judge in the case said during the verdict that Bendels published a 'deliberately untrue and contemptuous statement about Interior Minister Ms. Faeser (...) that would not be recognizable to the unbiased reader and is likely to significantly impair her public work'.
If a picture of Nancy Faeser holding a "I hate free speech" sign can be ruled to be a "deliberately untrue and contemptuous statement", satire has become effectively illegal.
Readit News
There is most definitely innovation in Europe. It just gets bought by the US, who is quick to forget where the technology came from.
As for unicorns and trillion dollars companies... some may say it's a feature, not a bug. It's great to claim to have free speech and competition, but when a few people own a few big monopolies and control the media, is it real? Regulations are not bad.
Deregulate the market and you get the oligopoly US of today (not the "great" version of the 1950s that had regulation which distributed the wealth much more equally).
That the EU doesn't have unicorns is not an accident of whatever rules you like or dislike, it's entirely by design.
Some regulations spit in the face of logic. It's as if the legislators said, "let's make being sick illegal! Checkmate, modern medicine, now everyone is healthy!" Such style of thinking is erosive of trust towards the political establishment and government.
Quite a singular case and it sparked a huge controversy on free speech in Germany, with most scholars and officials siding with the sentiment that what David Bendels did was disguisting, but probably covered by free speech to some degree.
Compared to the free speech violations (and the seemingly inconsequencial nature of the discussions after they happened) this is still just a singular case.
Also, purely from a conceptual standpoint I do not think that a free society has to tolerate every opinion of people who objctively seek to abolish it. If you have a significant fascist movement in your country your speech will have become less free, so limiting their speech before they do is an act of defending democracy and everybody who believes in it.
Just replace Nazis/fascists with radical islamists and check how free your speech really is.
Europe tends to have more established, "old" companies that do their own bit of innovation, and a few outliers like ASML that are crucial to many industries (besides silicon, there's pharma, media, retail, and of course a lot of manufacturing, each with their own innovation ecosystems, because many established companies have long figured out that it would be easier to sponsor local startups and then incorporate them than rebuild their orgs at random).
Hard to compete with the power of the dollar. I guess the Trump plan to push the value of the dollar down may finally make US acquisitions of European companies impossible and US salaries uncompetitive.
I don't think that unicorns, which tend to have a quasi-monopolistic position in their market segment, are healthy for society, or even for the economy (in the long run), vs many smaller companies.
So I see this as a good thing. The problem is that the draw of unicorns in the US does create a brain drain for those attracted by the prospect of becoming rich.
It's quite difficult to become rich in Europe, compared to the US. It's mostly "old money" that's passed down. But you can be successful and comfortable. Is it important to be "rich"?
Cope much?
As a European I'd rather not have half of our industries critically depend on AWS and Microsoft, especially now that the US has fully embraced governance by RNG. The choice isn't having or not having your own digital infrastructure, it's either having your own or having to depend on someone else.
We need to do better, but it should probably be done in our own terms.
Telcos sunk a considerable amount of money into building hosting facilities but could not deliver the same scale, international coverage and breadth of features that AWS could, so when Azure came around a lot of telco and datacenter people jumped ship.
Since then (it's been ten years for me) I've seen dozens of EU hosters consistently fail to add the kind of enterprise and security features that hyperscalers provide, and that IT departments _need_ for compliance purposes (Google is still catching up on some of those).
It's not about hosting VMs anymore or having Kubernetes for your startup, it's about the whole enchilada (auditing processes, distributed datacenters, management APIs, development ecosystem, etc.), and not even major hosting providers (some of which, by the way, were almost completely reliant on VMware...) can actually deliver.
And the same goes triple for all of the EU-sponsored/state-sponsored initiatives for datacenter creation/public cloud services/etc.
It seems to me that's a point in support of the idea that Unicorns are a problem and should not exist.
I'd rather have neither.
That's not to say that the European tech sector is doing fantastically. Still, as an end user, I'd rather have a thousand companies like Proton, Filen, Tutanota, Tresorit, Infomaniak, or DeepL than one Google.
A bunch of scared real-estate investors and pension funds who have their roots in STAYING in Europe when the (ad)venturers went overseas and built what has become the US.
It's not in the culture and it won't be.
Would that be more accurate? No, but no less either.
That's a weird complaint. 27 member states, manage to agree on a seven year budget, in less than a week. That's seems alright to me. I get that there have been weeks if not months of work done by bureaucrats leading up to that week, but still, seems reasonably fast.
Oh, and the EU should PRONTO implement the suggestions in the 2024 Draghi and Letta reports.
- You can absolutely get in trouble for voicing political speech in Europe. We've seen plenty of headlines of people who got fired in Europe for making offensive statements. In the UK in particular criticizing the wealthy is extremely dangerous because of slander laws.
- Europe absolutely does not have an extremely generous immigration policy. An estimated 24,000 immigrants have died trying to cross the Mediterranean. And this is because of European policy. It's because Europe refuses to honor refugee/asylum claims at the airport desperate people are forced to cross the sea in rickety dinghies.
- Europe does not track wealth of its citizens. Many companies are privately held. Many assets are held overseas. So how does the Economist know wealth inequality is low? But it is known that every time a heat wave hits Europe many elderly die because they can't afford to cool their home.
- “Nobody in Europe is even casually implying they will invade other countries.” Did the Economist forget that European soldiers actually joined the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq? Europe also used its military to topple the Gaddafi government in Libya. Europe doesn't just talk about invading other countries, it actually has invaded other countries in recent history. Must be amnesia! (You might believe these invasions were morally justified, but that's beside the point.)
- It's true that Europe does not have out of control tech execs who boast about throwing bits of Europe into the wood chipper. But this is because Europe's entirely depends on the US for tech and we don't have any oddball "founder CEO" types. There is no European Bezos, Gates, Jobs, or Musk. CEOs in Europe are professional managers. It's not the same.
The article isn't horrible, but it makes way too many claims that don't hold up to slight scrutiny.
Funny how now an American is somehow trying to blame Europe for it while America is acting like a victim because they were not sole benefactors of the alliance.
2. This isn't about blame or NATO or ethics. This is about the Economist rewriting history.
A journalist in Germany was just sentenced to seven months for posting a meme of a politician where she holds up a sign saying "I hate free speech".
https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/nancy-faeser-afd-...
That's called defamation.
Just because he later claimed it's satire doesn't make it satire.
Seven months for that seems insane to me. It looks far more like a meme/satire than an attempt to create a realistic fake, given it's just pure-black impact font and an implausible message ("I hate freedom of speech!") to be holding up on a sign.
Dead Comment
Not defending this specific decision, but you can find individual cases like this in the US as well. Overall the laws in Germany are somewhat more restrictive in certain areas, but I don't think that fundamentally affects free speech.
Which he will do exactly 0 months because it's a suspended sentence. Still crazy but nowhere close to "7 months of prison for a meme"
PS: Didn't the US just deport people to a foreign prison because they had tattoos ?
Quotation marks are usually used if you quote someone. Not if you make up additional things in your head that a person supposedly said.
Journalists typically write, not draw. Was there an article ? On which grounds was the journalist sentenced ? So on, so on.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czrn57340xlo
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-authorities-arrest-pales...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/06/foreign-stud...
In practice, even on this website, I have great difficulty figuring out how to phrase anything I want to say on Palestine and Israel in a way that's not likely to induce vitriol.
Heck, neither could Yitzhak Rabin, in his position as Israel's Prime Minister: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Yitzhak_Rabin
--
Hmm, I've just noticed something: you say "Germany", but some of the news I've been seeing from the USA is people losing their visas by supporting Palestine…
That particular case seems egregious, especially the jail part (edit: oh, it's a suspended sentence, so zero jail time). On the other hand a world where news organizations can just photoshop any sign onto any politician and claim they support whatever doesn't seem great either.
But neither does using ICE to snatch people off the streets for making social media posts. (Someone will reply to this with some variant of "oh, but they're immigrants, they don't deserve the freedom to criticize the US", and then we're back at the whataboutery Olympics)
Perhaps it's only worth getting worked up about free speech when the speech is true, authentic and accurate?
(epilogue: this whole topic was at the top of HN for about a minute before it got flagged off, lol)
All societies regulate speech. There is no such thing as free speech in the literal/absolute sense of the word. Probably every society has an instance that someone can point to as stifling speech. Your phrasing succinctly gets to the crux of the matter.
He posted a doctored image to make it look like that, which is a completely different thing, and should definitely be punishable.
> [...]
> What is left unmentioned, however, is that the trial only took place because Bendels previously refused to pay a fine of 210 daily rates imposed by the same district court in November.
So I don't see "sentenced to seven months for posting a meme of a politician where she holds up a sign saying 'I hate free speech'".
What I see is "mislead people into thinking the politician said something she did not, and then refused to pay the fine imposed by the court".
Deleted Comment
I for one am pretty happy every law that curbs racism. It has worked great so far. The people that play victim are just cosplaying and looking for attention.
The 60 minutes segment was also quite revealing of the (in my opinion, poor) state of free speech in Germany. [1]
As Bill Maher said, "Germany is so afraid to look like their Nazi past, that they're knocking on people's doors, taking people's phones and computers if you insult people online."
[0] https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/gewalt-gegen-poli...
[1] https://x.com/60Minutes/status/1891282394440732787
Deleted Comment
Bendels was sentenced to a 7 months suspended sentence and a fine of 1500 Euros, has to remove the image and apologize to Faeser. Bendels will appeal the decision.
I'm going to guess that this will be overturned on appeal. Every country has stupid courts that make bad decisions. I think this is kind of an edge case between satire and defamation, since Bendels is ostensibly a real journalist who reports on real facts—it seems odd to me that he would publish doctored pictures. Still, I think this will lean towards satire in the end, since I don't think most reasonable people would assume the picture of Faeser was real.
You can read about it here (German):
https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/nancy-faeser-erwirkt-...
The Online Safety Act in the UK has been discussed here before and it is part of a general trend to prevent "harmful" speech including specifically "legal but harmful speech".
Dead Comment
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/
https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/03/eu_backdoor_encryptio...
To be fair, it's only in discussions now, it hasn't been voted AFAIK and it hasn't been implemented.
Compare that to the NSA... ever heard of Snowden?
Correct but ChatControl now has a majority among EU Commissioners. The fact that something like this is even proposed in the "free" land and the people responsible not laughed out of the room is sickening.
> Compare that to the NSA... ever heard of Snowden?
Spying on your unencrypted communication? That's not comparable + https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
Dead Comment
David Bendels has been threatened with prison time and sentenced to seven months of probation for a Twitter meme [0]. It is the harshest sentence ever handed down to a journalist for a speech crime in the Federal Republic of Germany.
This is the tweet, poking fun at the German minister of the interior Nancy Faeser (the sign says "I hate free speech"):
https://x.com/Deu_Kurier/status/1762895292075053348
[0] https://www-welt-de.translate.goog/politik/deutschland/artic...
The comedic value would be even higher if it was an obvious tongue-in-cheek edit. Given it's professionally and seamlessly edited, then it's too ambiguous to be a meme and thus should not be protected as free speech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_defamation_law
> Bendels claimed the meme, posted by his newspaper's X account, was satirical.
> But the judge in the case said during the verdict that Bendels published a 'deliberately untrue and contemptuous statement about Interior Minister Ms. Faeser (...) that would not be recognizable to the unbiased reader and is likely to significantly impair her public work'.
Dead Comment