German court orders Youtube to restore deleted channel of news site
(jungefreiheit-de.translate.goog)
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The article is auto-translated.
tl;dr: Youtube deleted the channel of a small non-mainstream news site "Achse des Guten" because they were critical of Corona restrictions and mandatory vaccination. The site operators sued and won. Youtube has to restore their channel. Youtube lost several censorship lawsuits lately and had to restore content.
Kind of amusing that a country without freedom of speech is one of the few (maybe the only one?) where you can sue social media giants for censorship and win.
You probably need a further thousand years of failed experiments and revolutions to get there.
And that is assuming that things always move in the right direction.
That's why I said a thousand. I'm an optimist so I expect general slow progress through the peaks and valleys.
I’m sadly not sure society lasts another 1000 years…
In fact, I would be almost certain it will not.
But hey. Hold onto your optimism. I imagine it’s nice. I honestly wouldn’t know… 🤷🏻♂️
If society falls, another will be built.
Employee protection also helps a lot with free speech. If a European company fired you for your opinions, you could sue them for tons of damages or reinstatement.
Knowing this, people don't even try to get others fired. Although if they did try, it would probably violate privacy laws as well.
Wow. I didn’t know that. That protection doesn’t exist in Australia or NZ. At all…
Is that an EU-wide thing, then, or..?
Also surprising since Germany apparently doesn't have independent courts, and the government can arrest judges for ruling against covid19 restrictions.
This just sounds implausible on its face. They're generally not that obvious about it. Where are you getting it?
A few months back a judge ruled against some COVID mandate. In response local prosecutors opened an investigation into the judge for perversion of justice. They've executed search warrants for his office, home and that of witnesses in the case.
In Germany prosecutors are direct subordinates of local politicians, i.e. the ones whose mandate the judge ruled against. Meaning this investigation was an obvious retaliation. Haven't heard anything about this since then so I don't know if anyone actually got arrested.
In a more recent case, judges ruled against other COVID mandates. As a result the court "mysteriously" got rearranged and the chamber that ruled against the mandate was relieved of its duties and replaced with a new one.
Judges who rule against the government put their livelihood and possibly their freedom on the line in Germany.
That honestly, unironically sounds rather like Aus…
Although here, it’s not so much that courts are “subordinate”, but rather that politicians (particularly Federal ones) can, and do, simply overrule the court, at their whim…
See: Djokovic. Or the NT legalization of voluntary euthanasia in the 1990s, among other things…