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