this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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Summary

Elon Musk livestreamed a conversation with Alice Weidel, co-leader of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, on his platform X, endorsing her and urging support for the AfD ahead of Germany’s February 23 election.

The livestream, which drew over 200,000 viewers, raised concerns across Europe about Musk’s influence in foreign politics.

AfD, under observation for extremism, has gained popularity amid discontent with Chancellor Scholz’s government.

Musk’s promotion of Weidel and controversial remarks on other European issues are being monitored for violations of the EU’s Digital Services Act.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 20 hours ago (9 children)

Why is Germany not just blocking Twitter? I don't get it.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

Why are we just letting Nazis take over again? Seems like we had a solution to them before.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Money and power..... And propaganda.

The elites don't want immigrants, they want wage slaves. Who will come when they are told to, live like they are told to, work in any condition they are given and leave when they are told to.

So the goal is to deport these pesky immigrants with rights and import those slaves, then those slaves will work for extremely cheap cuz the threat of deportation and how their home countries are beyond fucked anyways.

Who benefits from slavery? Is it the working class (poor and middle) or the elites who will have cheap labor?

Not to mention this will reduce the salaries for everyday Germans, and then elites gets to claim 2 things to fellow germans:

  1. look at all the immigrants who are stealing your job and driving your wages down.

  2. look at how much our economy is growing (it will be the elites who will be getting all the wealth not the working/poor class)

Btw you can replace the whole scenario in USA as well with the whole H1B visa stuff.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago

And because people are too wimpy to kill the rich, they’ll go after the next best thing, the slave.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 18 hours ago (3 children)

The more serious issue is, why haven't they banned AfD. Where the fuck is the "Defensive" in "Defensive Democracy"?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 13 hours ago

After the actual Nazis banned a party, people made it far more difficult to ban parties.

You can try it, but it could fail. And the whole spectacle means more attention for them.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

That might be a good idea, but I think that folks need to examine fundamental factors underlying the rise of the far right and the ways in which limiting speech may be a weak remedy.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Germany has never had a problem with it before (post-WWII).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

What's the use of that information? They have that problem now.

It appears to be an internationally occurring problem.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

No, I mean they have never had a problem limiting Nazi speech before.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

Quite contrary, we have a big problem censoring Nazi speech.

We have some very specific rules when something can be censored and when it can't - and the far right has quite some training in "just not saying that, maybe only implicating it a little".

So any legal action outlawing then needs to rest on really solid legal basis or it will fail. Such a failure would be the propaganda the right wishes for.

Consequently they are always just shy of openly saying things but implying them. Like having election posters where their politicians can say "No we're not showing a Hitler salute in that image, we were just miming a roof of a house over a bunch of kids"

Sometimes a single politician gets caught with doing something too far, but then (of course) the whole party acts like they are shocked.

Getting rid of this shit is not easy, unfortunately. We can't censor what we don't like willy nilly.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Getting rid of a platform who's owner is trying to influence your elections even though he isn't even a citizen is not "willy nilly" by any means.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

I personally absolutely agree of getting rid of that shit. I just said there are big hurdles, and you need to do so in a very organized and based on proof way.

You can't just outlaw them because you don't like them, that doesn't work. Germany having laws against hate speech doesn't mean there's not also a law about freedom of expression in the Grundgesetz.

You need to prove them to be against democracy in a watertight way. That's what I mean with not willy-nilly.

Or as I read it once: Democracy implicitly protects its enemies.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

If you block certain social media channels that you personally don't agree with while being in charge, you set a dangerous precedent for other people blocking things they don't agree with should they ever come to power.

And censorship doesn't address the root cause in the first place. Alt-right / far-right clowns know that they are often operating outside of the law or at the very least skirting a line that makes them prone to being observed, so they'll typically operate with VPNs or other obfuscation tech that will let them access Twitter regardless.

All a block achieves is that regular citizens can't inform themselves about the crap that is being spewed to invalidate claims made by the right.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Germany has never had a problem with censoring Nazis in the past. I see no reason why they should start.

And I have no problem censoring harmful propaganda. The idea that harmful propaganda should be allowed because of some nebulous concept of freedom of speech is nonsense.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

The AfD is a legitimate political party. Legitimate as in, they haven't been caught with anything openly anti-constitutional.

Individual members have been, and were tried in court, and if found guilty were publicly expelled from the party, hence they operate under the guise of plausible deniability for the time being.

Nazi propaganda has been blocked once it's confirmed anti-constitutional, but you can't block a political party just like that.

And blocking Twitter as a whole is quite a big difference to blocking certain individuals or groups. No matter how much crap is on there, there are still a lot of legitimate postings, not least from legit government actors etc.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 13 hours ago

they haven't been caught with anything openly anti-constitutional.

The federal party is suspected to be anti constitutional and several state level partys have been declared as anti constitutional by the Verfassungsschutz, so that's not completely true.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Defensive Democracy

Would you say that banning political parties is undemocratic? If so, should the NSDAP (Nazi Party) be un-banned?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 18 hours ago

No, where did I say that? All I said is that as long as they are a legitimately recognized party, they can't be censored.

I'm all in favor of banning the AfD, but only after this has been achieved, can their public channels, mouthpieces and whatever be censored, not the other way around.

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