> Concrete examples - in Germany you are not allowed to insult politicians or the government in social media.

You're not allowed to insult anyone, https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__185.html , though the term "insult" is not nearly as broadly defined as in everyday speech. The law dates back to the 18th century, and has largely been unchanged for 150 years. I really don't understand the recent outrage over these and other laws. We have been fine.

More background: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beleidigung_(Deutschland)

> Concrete examples - in Germany you are not allowed to insult politicians or the government in social media.

Germany restricts insulting individuals / your neighbour, police officer, a pastor or a minister. There’s no special law for politicians. Political criticism is protected under the Basic Law (constitution). Go ahead and be crucial about a politician’s actions but don’t insult their person’s honour or use a slur. That’s not your freedom of speech, that’s the dignity. In fact, you can even insult the government! You can say German government as the government is not a person.

They had TV licenses. Also they are the state media arm of a country that is in a proxy war with the EU and NATO. I don't think that situation would even pass muster in the US.

> Germany is currently actively campaigning to force everyone to use their real names on all social media and force ID checks to do so, a clear chilling effect for free speech.

Source? (Other than one derailed politician, which unfortunately we get to call our chancellor, having a moment? He's still not "Germany", though, not even "the German government".)

> Macron has been railing against free speech specifically in recent months, calling it "bullshit".

I think you're misrepresenting what he said:

https://www.politico.eu/article/emmanuelmacron-calls-social-...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-18/macron-bl...

> some for speech recognized as protected by international organizations.

Can you share some concrete examples from reputable sources that show these? Every examples I've seen have been clear-cut calls for violence, or unambiguous harassment.

Ten seconds of searching:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/1qv0vpi/...

The propaganda take I keep seeing is that you can get arrested for misgendering people or something, but these are at least close to incitement to violence. Some clearly cross that line.

To be clear I’m closer to the American view. I think the bar should be very, very high for speech to be criminally actionable. Just pointing out that it doesn’t seem as nuts as some make it sound.

https://euvsdisinfo.eu/disinformation-cases/?disinfo_keyword...

Here's a source with some: https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

> The January 14, 2016, edition of Weekly Disinformation Review reported the reemergence of several previously debunked Russian propaganda stories, including that Polish President Andrzej Duda was insisting that Ukraine return former Polish territory, that Islamic State fighters were joining pro-Ukrainian forces, and that there was a Western-backed coup in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital.11

> Sometimes, Russian propaganda is picked up and rebroadcast by legitimate news outlets; more frequently, social media repeats the themes, messages, or falsehoods introduced by one of Russia’s many dissemination channels. For example, German news sources rebroadcast Russian disinformation about atrocities in Ukraine in early 2014, and Russian disinformation about EU plans to deny visas to young Ukrainian men was repeated with such frequency in Ukrainian media that the Ukrainian general staff felt compelled to post a rebuttal.12

> Sometimes, however, events reported in Russian propaganda are wholly manufactured, like the 2014 social media campaign to create panic about an explosion and chemical plume in St. Mary's Parish, Louisiana, that never happened.15 Russian propaganda has relied on manufactured evidence—often photographic. Some of these images are easily exposed as fake due to poor photo editing, such as discrepancies of scale, or the availability of the original (pre-altered) image.16 Russian propagandists have been caught hiring actors to portray victims of manufactured atrocities or crimes for news reports (as was the case when Viktoria Schmidt pretended to have been attacked by Syrian refugees in Germany for Russian's Zvezda TV network), or faking on-scene news reporting (as shown in a leaked video in which “reporter” Maria Katasonova is revealed to be in a darkened room with explosion sounds playing in the background rather than on a battlefield in Donetsk when a light is switched on during the recording).17

> RT stated that blogger Brown Moses (a staunch critic of Syria's Assad regime whose real name is Eliot Higgins) had provided analysis of footage suggesting that chemical weapon attacks on August 21, 2013, had been perpetrated by Syrian rebels. In fact, Higgins's analysis concluded that the Syrian government was responsible for the attacks and that the footage had been faked to shift the blame.18 Similarly, several scholars and journalists, including Edward Lucas, Luke Harding, and Don Jensen, have reported that books that they did not write—and containing views clearly contrary to their own—had been published in Russian under their names.

I found that source on the Wikipedia page for RT after a couple of minutes. You can find more pretty easily.