Yes, Germany is very hypocritical, a lot of people have short memories.

On another hand, Germany is on the spotlight because it's the country which is going to decide at the end. Less critics about the usual suspects who love to restrict personal freedoms like France, Spain, Italy ..

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dmix 3 days ago | parent [-]

Spain is particularly bad for meddling with the internet, mostly with regards to piracy.

While Germany has arrested many thousands of people for online speech, similar to the UK. But the UK gets much more media attention over it.

> Battling far-right extremism, Germany has gone further than any other Western democracy to prosecute individuals for what they say online, testing the limits of free speech on the internet.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/23/technology/germany-intern...

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varispeed 3 days ago | parent [-]

Chat Control is extremist - a terrorist attack on civil liberties. If Germany were serious about its commitments, the architects behind this assault would already be facing prosecution. Instead, authorities focus on token speech prosecutions while leaving the machinery of mass surveillance untouched.

The optics are chilling: yesterday it was door-to-door searches under authoritarian regimes; today it’s device-to-device searches for wrongthink. That isn’t protecting against extremism - it’s repeating it with new tools.

	▲	dmix 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yes the arguments for free speech and privacy are self-evident. People always think they can add conditions, as if those conditions won't perpetually expand to greater and greater areas. Or become a power given to dangerous individuals who form future governments.