In the same poll, only 31% said they would feel safe saying the same views in private. My take: this was a partisan political poll of an extremely paranoid group of people.
Or they're worried things said in private would leak. If there's a large cost to saying something publicly, the risk carries over to saying it privately too.
What's said in private is a classic "they said, I said". It's not a legal danger. This article implies the danger is legal liability, which wouldn't explain so little willing to voice their views in private.
The only reasonable explanation is the poll is done on a very private or paranoid group
They used to hang people for heresy, and they still do in some countries. I think "people will be upset with me" is pretty mild viewed in a historical lens
> What's said in private is a classic "they said, I said". It's not a legal danger.
This is false, even if we limit ourselves to only legal danger. If you say something to two people, and one of them repeats your words to the police, the police can easily ask the second person for confirmation. Add a few vague "lying to the police is very serious" threats, and there's a good chance the second person will betray you.
Yeah, the blog post, from a biased writer, makes the implication. The poll itself was quite neutral IMO.
I wrote in another comment [1] why people might be wary about voicing their opinions, TL;DR: polarizing topics with staunch opinions from both sides (and about the other side) would lead to heated debates.
It is a renowned institute but I am not sure if 1283 people are enough for being representative. But most importantly you have to read the question carefully. It includes people not stating a controversial opinion to avoid an argument. Therefore the poll is vulnerable for misterpretation.
Absolutely. See the recent downfall of the Labour Party here in the UK. Also see the not-so-silent boo-ing by fans of the England Football team whenever they "take the knee" - the fans are accused of racism in this case (which I don't believe, but I'd be told to shutup as well).
"Would you say that you are free to express your opinion in public or do you have to be careful with certain or many topics?" („Würden Sie sagen, man kann seine Meinung in der Öffentlichkeit frei äußern oder muss man bei einigen oder vielen Themen vorsichtig sein?“)
As a German, I believe that I am free to express my opinion, nevertheless I would say that there are obviously many topics of discussion where one has to be careful just because there is lots of potential to be misunderstood.
I'm fairly sure that at any point in history there was a fairly large set of controversial opinions, voicing of which could cause you trouble. Number of opinions you could voice that would get you in very serious trouble is fairly low right now in Germany.
I think it's really hard to come up with a good metric for freedom of speech with the amount of effort you usually put into online comments. But I bet there are NGOs with various opinions on the topic that rate countries. For example Germany is #13/180 in the Reporters Without Borders ranking of freedom of press https://rsf.org/en/ranking_table, which probably correlates well with garden variety definitions of freedom of speech.
Yes and the reason why we aren't ranked higher is that the press was not properly protected by police at right wing and anti-corona-measure protests.
We were ranked at place 11 but were downranked cause of continous attacks on journalists.[1] But the people wo did this are those who cry loudly: "We have no freedom of speech". I even read in this thread "Germany is a totalitarian dystopia with no free speech"
Those people are so far away from reality. I am concerned they might never find back.
"Germany's Network Enforcement Law, or NetzDG … requires social media companies to block or remove content that violates one of twenty restrictions on hate and defamatory speech in the German Criminal Code," Diana Lee wrote for Yale Law School's Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic. "In effect, the NetzDG conscripts social media companies into governmental service as content regulators," with millions of euros in fines hanging over their heads if they guess wrong. - https://reason.com/2020/10/12/german-style-internet-censorsh...
Obviously the magnitude of the trouble you would get in differs. However if you are not careful you still will get into trouble. It is as if you read in a lot of opinions in my statement that simply isn't there.
I honestly don't know what the perception of people is that they compare modern day US with the Stasi times.
I'm serious, the comparison is so out of this world, but I keep hearing it.
Tell me anything that is politically incorrect that you could say in a bar that will get you tortured/executed/imprisoned.
I'm really not saying that this political correctness craze is any good and I'm pretty much on the it's too much in many cases side, but the degrees between getting bad looks and a discussion that gets heated.
Whenever I also have this argument, some people go nut picking and get me a couple of example where you could say that, I'm not even saying those don't exist, and they are terrible, it's just not even close to systematic and nothing to do with the Stasi times.
Also in regards to Germany, have you ever been there? I know it's anecdotal but people basically there just speak their minds, I've heard mall kinds of right wing politically incorrect stuff, on both sides.
In Germany you can't advocate for far-right organizations (or the German communist party!) because there has been .. trouble with that kind of thing in the past.
Die Linke is in fact the successor to the Communist Party, although their ideology has shifted over time.
KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands) — in East Germany, merged with SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) in 1946 to form SED. In West Germany, banned after 1956.
SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) - ruled East Germany until the democratic transition in 1989. Rebranded as PDS in 1990.
PDS (Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus) - Merged with the minor party WASG in 2007 to form Die Linke.
Yes they are the successor. But does that matter? The CDU was founded mainly by previous members of the Zentrum party. That was the party that voted with the NSDAP for the "Ermächtigungsgesetz" that gave Hitler the power over germany.
But the party changed over time and today it doesnt matter anymore. Same goes for die Linke in my opinion. The only thing that should count, are the targets of a party.
The term for this (most commonly in social sciences research ?) is 'double barreled question'. It is bad specifically because you do not know which question is being answered.
The obvious bias of this website is...obvious.
Often I don't feel free to express my views in the US, not because there are social consequences but because it is simply not a space where my opinion is useful or valid. E.g., I don't feel free to express my views publicly about other peoples parenting decisions.
The article posted here starts with an outcome and then takes a poorly written poll question as the sole piece of evidence to support its preformed conclusions.
The poll in no way supports the statement: "The view of Germans that they are living without free speech would be of little surprise. What is most disconcerting is that they seem to reconciled to living without this basic human right."
Even if the poll supported the first sentence, it doesn't even COME CLOSE to supporting the second one.
Turley is extremly biased and the whole article is ridiculous.
Even the article that he cites is from "die Welt" which itself is a pretty biased right conservative medium.
I think it is way more problematic how he intentionally misinterprets a survey of 1283 people to spread the constructs in his head.
yup...the article started with an outcome and a belief and found sought evidence to justify it. That this is the best evidence they can find? really?
It's not about agree or disagree...its just that if this is the best argumentation you can do for your point and hold that opinion in good faith, you should probably re-evaluate your point before you try and convince others of it.
Characterizing Turley as “biased” and “right conservative” is pretty disingenuous. A few years ago I would have called him a pretty standard Hacker News liberal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Turley
> In appearances on Countdown with Keith Olbermann and The Rachel Maddow Show, he called for criminal prosecution of Bush administration officials for war crimes, including torture.[21]
> He has opined that the Supreme Court is injecting itself into partisan politics.[29] He frequently has expressed the view that recent nominees to the court hold extreme views.[30]
> Turley described U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder in an op-ed as President Barack Obama's sin-eater, writing:
> “For Obama, there has been no better sin eater than Holder. When the president promised CIA employees early in his first term that they would not be investigated for torture, it was the attorney general who shielded officials from prosecution. When the Obama administration decided it would expand secret and warrantless surveillance, it was Holder who justified it. When the president wanted the authority to kill any American he deemed a threat without charge or trial, it was Holder who went public to announce the ‘kill list’ policy.”
I think it’s more accurate to say Turley is a libertarian-leaning liberal in a party that’s closed ranks around its statist wing and thrown its libertarians completely under the bus. (And I say that as a statist who didn’t agree with Turley back then!)
Turley is best known among "liberals" for having supported the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, suing Barack Obama, opposing the ACA, supporting President Trump's extralegal redirection of funds to his border wall project, and opposing Trump's impeachment. I don't think he's a pretty standard Hacker News liberal.
I'm not sure I remember any time during my adult life where the Democratic party had a libertarian wing. I'm curious what you think are examples of libertarian Democrats. People like Feingold and Wyden get cited here because they're ardent about conventionally-construed civil liberties, but that's just a small part of what a libertarian is.
He also called for Bush to be prosecuted for “war crimes,” opposes the death penalty, etc. And lots of Hacker News liberals opposed Obama for drone strikes, surveillance, etc.
I recall a pretty strong civil libertarian wing among democrats during the Bush era. I’d say Howard Dean at least had some libertarian tendencies, such as supporting gun rights.
Lots of Democrats support gun rights. The Illinois death penalty was eliminated by a Republican governor. That doesn't make them Libertarians. No Democrat supports eliminating the Department of Education, for instance.
I think your translation is slightly imprecise. It’s unclear in the English whether the “you” in “you are free to express your opinion” is being used as the 2nd-person pronoun (i.e., equivalent to German Sie) or as the generic pronoun (i.e. man).
For those who can’t read the German version: it’s the latter.
Unfortunately there is no way to distinguish these two in English other than using the somewhat dated pronoun “one”. It usually doesn’t cause any confusion but I think in this particular case, the answer is different depending on the meaning. I might feel safe to say my opinions, because I don’t believe anything particularly controversial, but still think “one” might need to be careful depending on the particular content of “one”‘s views.
No the question is exactly right and any German would immediately understand what it is really about. Because of the new "hatespeech" laws homes of people got raided because they had the wrong opinion about the corona measures posted somwhere on the internet. You even can be thrown into prison for many years for wrong opinions. As of today Germany is a totalitarian dystopia with no free speech. However those laws are enforced only selectively. Muslims demonstrating against Israel and chanting "death to all jews" get a free pass.
In the US, there are certain opinions for which you'll suffer repercussions from public shaming to losing your livelihood to getting taken down from social media. For example, last year you couldn't discuss the lab leak theory of covid. When you discuss these topics, you need to 'be careful.'
Most often, I don't worry about being misunderstood, but that people will overestimate my interest in debating a topic to some ultimate viewpoint or stalemate. I like trading a couple of comments - asking a question, hearing a bit from others, but I'm not there for a showdown. It's easier to feel this out amongst your circles of friends and acquaintances, but the scope explodes on the internet. I run a sports forum and I'm frequently amazed at people debating a subjective non-topic like their life depends on it. I have no idea where they find the time.
"Careful" is not a perfect translation of "vorsichtig". "Vorsicht" has a connotation of avoiding danger. So if you have to be "vorsichtig" to avoid being misunderstood, that doesn't just imply that there is potential to be misunderstood, it also implies that it's dangerous to be misunderstood.
> German Chancellor Angela Merkel made a major concession to Europe's populist movement this week when she admitted the existence of so-called “no-go zones” in Germany.
> Despite evidence of the existence of areas in Western countries, European leaders and left-wing media commentators have long denied, and sometimes even mocked, those who claim that no-go zones exist.
> “It means for example that there cannot be any no-go areas, that there cannot be areas where no-one dares to go but there are such places,” she said. “One has to call them by name and do something about it.”
This must be bullshit, in some way or another. Sure—you shouldn’t just come out and advocate the death penalty for homosexuals. But I don’t believe 81% are in favor of something like that. And anything less drastic, I don’t see much hesitation to express those views in public.
In fact the last 18 months have seen weekly protests professing a host of views that I had considered extinct.
thats the kicker. BOTH of those could easily fall under the single strawman question that this article bases its flawed argument off of.
Views that you could 'feel' not free to express could include:
- Stating facts about their political opponents
- Expressing their acceptance of NAMBLA
- Enjoying pineapple on pizza
You can't reduce your argument to a single decontextualized question about how people feel in general. Show me some qualitative data on how people, in German, interpret that question and then we can talk about how badly the article abuses that one poll question.
I agree that contextualizing the question could help, but that doesn’t mean the poll question is useless. We expect “acceptance of NAMBLA” to be a pretty unusual view in the public. The fact that 80% of the public has some views they’d feel uncomfortable expressing suggests that either:
1) There is a “long tail” to controversial ideas, and while each idea may be held by a small number of individuals, holding at least one such idea is common across the population had a whole.
2) There are widely held ideas that the public nonetheless feels uncomfortable talking about.
In the first case, that suggests that society had more than just a handful of ideas (like Holocaust denial or support for pedophilia) that are deemed beyond public discussion. In the second case, that suggests suppression of views held by the majority. Either way that’s a pretty telling statistic.
The poll question isn't useless because it lacks context, it lacks context specifically because it is a loaded question. The question is operating by design. This hand waving about 'uncomfortable talking about' and 'long tails' is all designed as cover for bad faith arguments about the concept of free speech.
This entire effort is a bald faced exercise in laundering right wing ideology as uncriticizable, and speech by those outside of the right as some form of 'not speech' when it is critical of the ideas.
Being uncomfortable talking about something is not prima facia evidence you are being silenced, it is only evidence that you are being silent. You aren't entitled, and have no right, to be comfortable when you share controversial ideas. This is why there isn't a difference between your 1 and 2. 2 does not suggest suppression. 2 could just as easily suggest growth of a society or a cultural characteristic that someone from the US misunderstands.
> Being uncomfortable talking about something is not prima facia evidence you are being silenced, it is only evidence that you are being silent. You aren't entitled, and have no right, to be comfortable when you share controversial ideas.
I don’t know about the German perspective, but in the U.S. folks spent a lot of time not only making legal space for controversial ideas, but making cultural space for them. You may not have a “right” to be comfortable sharing controversial ideas, but a society where people feel free to do so is arguably better than one where people don’t.
Living in Germany and having done a lot of travelling as well as working in multi-national teams for years, this sounds very strange. Compared to especially the US, in Germany "even" politics and religion are debated in the public but also at BBQs with friends and family.
As somebody else noted, this seems to be a "poll" that was trying to push a certain agenda.
There is indeed a growing number of people that understand right to "free speech" as the right to utter anything without anybody being allowed to question their statement. If you question their statement, they claim you are violation their right on "free speech".
And an even more concerning group are people that utter "opinions" that are relevant due to legal reasons. E.g. claiming the holocaust did not happen, glorifying murder and prosecution of minorities, calling to murder certain people ...
These people also cry out loud about how their "free speech" is limited by the evil green leftwing (which it isn't) government ...
Here in the US it seems practically as bad. And the Internet is just as bad - big tech’s stuffed with DSA activists - Marxists - who create lists of wrongthinkers to share with people like The Atlantic Group and Joan Donovan.
I can't speak for others, but for me, I don't share my views publicly because there's a nonzero chance some crazy right-winger will try to find and kill me.
I've already been stalked and "screamed" at online because of an offhand comment I made on a political article once.
Freedom of speech in a civilized country generally also includes freedom from violent retaliation for saying the wrong thing.
I'm fine with being insulted or yelled at for my views. But if someone physically attacks me for my views, that means something has gone very, very wrong with society.
Because it is literally illegal to do so. There are many German laws - first and foremost concerning Volksverhetzung - that make saying things illegal even if they are true. So the other 82% don't know the law.
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Ah yeah, the survey asks "Do you think you can say anything you want freely, or do you have to watch what you say on some topics?", and the blogger rides the Stasi and fascism horse about governmental free speech restrictions, although no such thing was discussed in the survey.
Google translation of the question: "Would you say one can freely express one's opinion on anything in public, or does one have to be careful about some or many topics?"
The German summary linked from his blog says "The rude forms of argument are given as the reason for this low value.".
The survey doesn't even ask how the people lean, and I know during the refugee crisis, even pro-refugee people are wary of discussing that topic, because somebody at the next table in the bar (or sitting opposite you in your own kitchen) could have a different opinion and everybody was very firm in their belief, leading to heated debates. The observation was, "Flüchtlinge" ("refugees") was the new F-word.
Turleys article is shallow and full of false assumptions.
He cites one Survey of 1283 people and thinks he can deduce the consequences of european hate-speech-laws from that. Despite the fact that I doubt that this small poll is representative, his assumptions are completly wrong.
What the by him cited article implies is that people are carefull with their opinion not because of laws but because of potential backslash from other people. Many people avoid controverse opinions because they want to avoid arguments. And the way the german question is written, this kind of avoidance is included. This has nothing to do with german laws.
If I read "I have long been a critic of the German laws prohibiting certain symbols and phrases" I am disgusted. Prohibiting the Swastika is part of historical responsibility we have as a society. That has nothing to do with free speech and the fact that turley implies that says alot about his mindset.
Luckily saying "Put all Jews in gas chambers" is not considered free speech here. We have to prevent on all means that history repeats itself. And the paradox of intolerance[1] is an important part of that.
contrary to what most people think, Weimar Germany did have hate-speech laws, and they were applied quite frequently. [..] Leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech. Streicher served two prison sentences. Rather than deterring the Nazis and countering anti-Semitism, the many court cases served as effective public-relations machinery, affording Streicher the kind of attention he would never have found in a climate of a free and open debate.
Streicher was indeed sentenced to (short) terms in prison but it's not recorded that he ever had to serve any of them, being able o take advantage of criminal amnesties and later the privileges of a Reichstag deputy.
To be sure, courts are meant to handle individual or corporate matters, and not ideal or even effective in the maintenance of polities. But it is a mistake to compare the Weimer-era standards with current hate speech laws in Europe since theya re separated by the facts of WW2 and the Holocaust.
I don't think it's all political or hate speech problem, but an overboarding political correctness which seems to be everywhere around in these days. The SJW are up to misinterpret everything you said, so everything you say might be end up as being live threatening (in the meaning of your public social live or you lose your job).
68 comments
[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadThe only reasonable explanation is the poll is done on a very private or paranoid group
Heresy - questioning the orthodoxy of today's doctrines - carries a high punishment these days.
This is false, even if we limit ourselves to only legal danger. If you say something to two people, and one of them repeats your words to the police, the police can easily ask the second person for confirmation. Add a few vague "lying to the police is very serious" threats, and there's a good chance the second person will betray you.
I wrote in another comment [1] why people might be wary about voicing their opinions, TL;DR: polarizing topics with staunch opinions from both sides (and about the other side) would lead to heated debates.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27514258
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allensbach_Institute
[2]: https://www.ifd-allensbach.de/fileadmin/user_upload/FAZ_Mai2...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurter_Allgemeine_Zeitung
[4]: https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/allensbach-umfrag...
"Would you say that you are free to express your opinion in public or do you have to be careful with certain or many topics?" („Würden Sie sagen, man kann seine Meinung in der Öffentlichkeit frei äußern oder muss man bei einigen oder vielen Themen vorsichtig sein?“)
As a German, I believe that I am free to express my opinion, nevertheless I would say that there are obviously many topics of discussion where one has to be careful just because there is lots of potential to be misunderstood.
How am I supposed to answer this poll?
Would you call this nearly-perfect free-speech?
We were ranked at place 11 but were downranked cause of continous attacks on journalists.[1] But the people wo did this are those who cry loudly: "We have no freedom of speech". I even read in this thread "Germany is a totalitarian dystopia with no free speech"
Those people are so far away from reality. I am concerned they might never find back.
[1] https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/panorama/pressefr...
Germany Raids Homes of 36 People Accused of Hateful Postings Over Social Media - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/20/world/europe/germany-36-a... (a few of the arrests were for threats and coercion, I'm sure you'll prefer to focus on those)
I'm serious, the comparison is so out of this world, but I keep hearing it.
Tell me anything that is politically incorrect that you could say in a bar that will get you tortured/executed/imprisoned.
I'm really not saying that this political correctness craze is any good and I'm pretty much on the it's too much in many cases side, but the degrees between getting bad looks and a discussion that gets heated.
Whenever I also have this argument, some people go nut picking and get me a couple of example where you could say that, I'm not even saying those don't exist, and they are terrible, it's just not even close to systematic and nothing to do with the Stasi times.
Also in regards to Germany, have you ever been there? I know it's anecdotal but people basically there just speak their minds, I've heard mall kinds of right wing politically incorrect stuff, on both sides.
In Germany you can't advocate for far-right organizations (or the German communist party!) because there has been .. trouble with that kind of thing in the past.
How does that work?
We have communist parties here but they almost get no votes ( DKP and MLPD)
KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands) — in East Germany, merged with SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) in 1946 to form SED. In West Germany, banned after 1956.
SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) - ruled East Germany until the democratic transition in 1989. Rebranded as PDS in 1990.
PDS (Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus) - Merged with the minor party WASG in 2007 to form Die Linke.
But the party changed over time and today it doesnt matter anymore. Same goes for die Linke in my opinion. The only thing that should count, are the targets of a party.
The obvious bias of this website is...obvious.
Often I don't feel free to express my views in the US, not because there are social consequences but because it is simply not a space where my opinion is useful or valid. E.g., I don't feel free to express my views publicly about other peoples parenting decisions.
The article posted here starts with an outcome and then takes a poorly written poll question as the sole piece of evidence to support its preformed conclusions.
The poll in no way supports the statement: "The view of Germans that they are living without free speech would be of little surprise. What is most disconcerting is that they seem to reconciled to living without this basic human right."
Even if the poll supported the first sentence, it doesn't even COME CLOSE to supporting the second one.
I think it is way more problematic how he intentionally misinterprets a survey of 1283 people to spread the constructs in his head.
It's not about agree or disagree...its just that if this is the best argumentation you can do for your point and hold that opinion in good faith, you should probably re-evaluate your point before you try and convince others of it.
> In appearances on Countdown with Keith Olbermann and The Rachel Maddow Show, he called for criminal prosecution of Bush administration officials for war crimes, including torture.[21]
> He has opined that the Supreme Court is injecting itself into partisan politics.[29] He frequently has expressed the view that recent nominees to the court hold extreme views.[30]
> Turley described U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder in an op-ed as President Barack Obama's sin-eater, writing:
> “For Obama, there has been no better sin eater than Holder. When the president promised CIA employees early in his first term that they would not be investigated for torture, it was the attorney general who shielded officials from prosecution. When the Obama administration decided it would expand secret and warrantless surveillance, it was Holder who justified it. When the president wanted the authority to kill any American he deemed a threat without charge or trial, it was Holder who went public to announce the ‘kill list’ policy.”
I think it’s more accurate to say Turley is a libertarian-leaning liberal in a party that’s closed ranks around its statist wing and thrown its libertarians completely under the bus. (And I say that as a statist who didn’t agree with Turley back then!)
I'm not sure I remember any time during my adult life where the Democratic party had a libertarian wing. I'm curious what you think are examples of libertarian Democrats. People like Feingold and Wyden get cited here because they're ardent about conventionally-construed civil liberties, but that's just a small part of what a libertarian is.
I recall a pretty strong civil libertarian wing among democrats during the Bush era. I’d say Howard Dean at least had some libertarian tendencies, such as supporting gun rights.
For those who can’t read the German version: it’s the latter.
Unfortunately there is no way to distinguish these two in English other than using the somewhat dated pronoun “one”. It usually doesn’t cause any confusion but I think in this particular case, the answer is different depending on the meaning. I might feel safe to say my opinions, because I don’t believe anything particularly controversial, but still think “one” might need to be careful depending on the particular content of “one”‘s views.
You are totally lost, I really hope for you that you will find the way back into reality.
> German Chancellor Angela Merkel made a major concession to Europe's populist movement this week when she admitted the existence of so-called “no-go zones” in Germany.
> Despite evidence of the existence of areas in Western countries, European leaders and left-wing media commentators have long denied, and sometimes even mocked, those who claim that no-go zones exist.
> “It means for example that there cannot be any no-go areas, that there cannot be areas where no-one dares to go but there are such places,” she said. “One has to call them by name and do something about it.”
In fact the last 18 months have seen weekly protests professing a host of views that I had considered extinct.
…and, of course, HN eats it up.
Views that you could 'feel' not free to express could include:
- Stating facts about their political opponents
- Expressing their acceptance of NAMBLA
- Enjoying pineapple on pizza
You can't reduce your argument to a single decontextualized question about how people feel in general. Show me some qualitative data on how people, in German, interpret that question and then we can talk about how badly the article abuses that one poll question.
1) There is a “long tail” to controversial ideas, and while each idea may be held by a small number of individuals, holding at least one such idea is common across the population had a whole.
2) There are widely held ideas that the public nonetheless feels uncomfortable talking about.
In the first case, that suggests that society had more than just a handful of ideas (like Holocaust denial or support for pedophilia) that are deemed beyond public discussion. In the second case, that suggests suppression of views held by the majority. Either way that’s a pretty telling statistic.
This entire effort is a bald faced exercise in laundering right wing ideology as uncriticizable, and speech by those outside of the right as some form of 'not speech' when it is critical of the ideas.
Being uncomfortable talking about something is not prima facia evidence you are being silenced, it is only evidence that you are being silent. You aren't entitled, and have no right, to be comfortable when you share controversial ideas. This is why there isn't a difference between your 1 and 2. 2 does not suggest suppression. 2 could just as easily suggest growth of a society or a cultural characteristic that someone from the US misunderstands.
I don’t know about the German perspective, but in the U.S. folks spent a lot of time not only making legal space for controversial ideas, but making cultural space for them. You may not have a “right” to be comfortable sharing controversial ideas, but a society where people feel free to do so is arguably better than one where people don’t.
As somebody else noted, this seems to be a "poll" that was trying to push a certain agenda.
There is indeed a growing number of people that understand right to "free speech" as the right to utter anything without anybody being allowed to question their statement. If you question their statement, they claim you are violation their right on "free speech".
And an even more concerning group are people that utter "opinions" that are relevant due to legal reasons. E.g. claiming the holocaust did not happen, glorifying murder and prosecution of minorities, calling to murder certain people ... These people also cry out loud about how their "free speech" is limited by the evil green leftwing (which it isn't) government ...
I've already been stalked and "screamed" at online because of an offhand comment I made on a political article once.
I'm fine with being insulted or yelled at for my views. But if someone physically attacks me for my views, that means something has gone very, very wrong with society.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
― George Orwell, 1984
The survey question and results itself, page 24 for this 18% figure: https://www.ifd-allensbach.de/fileadmin/user_upload/FAZ_Mai2...
Google translation of the question: "Would you say one can freely express one's opinion on anything in public, or does one have to be careful about some or many topics?"
The German summary linked from his blog says "The rude forms of argument are given as the reason for this low value.".
The survey doesn't even ask how the people lean, and I know during the refugee crisis, even pro-refugee people are wary of discussing that topic, because somebody at the next table in the bar (or sitting opposite you in your own kitchen) could have a different opinion and everybody was very firm in their belief, leading to heated debates. The observation was, "Flüchtlinge" ("refugees") was the new F-word.
He cites one Survey of 1283 people and thinks he can deduce the consequences of european hate-speech-laws from that. Despite the fact that I doubt that this small poll is representative, his assumptions are completly wrong.
What the by him cited article implies is that people are carefull with their opinion not because of laws but because of potential backslash from other people. Many people avoid controverse opinions because they want to avoid arguments. And the way the german question is written, this kind of avoidance is included. This has nothing to do with german laws.
If I read "I have long been a critic of the German laws prohibiting certain symbols and phrases" I am disgusted. Prohibiting the Swastika is part of historical responsibility we have as a society. That has nothing to do with free speech and the fact that turley implies that says alot about his mindset.
Luckily saying "Put all Jews in gas chambers" is not considered free speech here. We have to prevent on all means that history repeats itself. And the paradox of intolerance[1] is an important part of that.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27417789
https://www.bjpa.org/content/upload/bjpa/4_an/4_Anti-Semitis...
To be sure, courts are meant to handle individual or corporate matters, and not ideal or even effective in the maintenance of polities. But it is a mistake to compare the Weimer-era standards with current hate speech laws in Europe since theya re separated by the facts of WW2 and the Holocaust.