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.
Unbelievable how many People can give an in-depth analysis from an Ocean away what exactly the Problem is and how to fix it.
How about you start by don’t electing Musk and his Sidekick as President?
That would be a good start and a lot of help for everyone.
We need to treat Nazis how they used to be treated
“Musk likes it, so you know it’s bad!”
Why is Germany not just blocking Twitter? I don’t get it.
The more serious issue is, why haven’t they banned AfD. Where the fuck is the “Defensive” in “Defensive Democracy”?
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.
In Germany, they view extremist politics as anything to do with Islam, so if you promote the expulsion of Muslims or their reeducation or forcing them to sign pledges to Israel to become citizens, you’re just being German.
How about you stfu?
You seem to have no Idea what you are talking about.
The afd is not the root problem and won’t go away if it were banned
The problem is moderate politicians persistently ignoring (and patronising) the working class over serious reservations they have over immigration and cultural dilution
Same as everywhere else…
Why are we just letting Nazis take over again? Seems like we had a solution to them before.
When large parts of the population say they’d like less islamic immigration and, instead of listening, politicians patronise them, what you end up with are Nazis…
It’s Mexican immigration they care about. But if they wanted their jobs to be taken by skilled immigrant workers, they’re gonna get that with trump. Whoops. Leopards.
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.
Germany has never had a problem with it before (post-WWII).
What’s the use of that information? They have that problem now.
It appears to be an internationally occurring problem.
No, I mean they have never had a problem limiting Nazi speech before.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Because they have their own problems which are real an not reality tv bullshit.
A world propaganda mouthpiece with millions of users is not “reality TV bullshit” and dismissing it like it has no effect is the wrong thing to do.
So what is the right thing to do homie?
See my very first post.
Removed by mod
So if it was far-left it would be ok?
Of course, billionaires knows best about politics and shit, we leftist love to simp for them.
/S