Tag: hate

  • ‘I hate freedom of opinion’ meme leads to sentencing in German court

    ‘I hate freedom of opinion’ meme leads to sentencing in German court

    Last year, FIRE launched the Free Speech Dispatch, a regular series covering new and continuing censorship trends and challenges around the world. Our goal is to help readers better understand the global context of free expression. Want to make sure you don’t miss an update? Sign up for our newsletter. 

    Guilty finding for German editor’s doctored “I hate freedom of opinion” image 

    Germany’s speech policing can’t stay out of the spotlight for long, apparently. This month, David Bendels, editor-in-chief for the Alternative for Germany (AfD)-affiliated Deutschland Kurier, received a seven-month suspended sentence for “abuse, slander or defamation against persons in political life.” 

    The offense? Bendels had edited and posted a photo of Interior Minister Nancy Faeser so that a sign she held said, “I hate freedom of opinion.” (Just think of how many different versions you saw of the Michelle Obama sign meme here in the U.S.) A Bavarian district court found Bendels guilty under a provision giving advanced protections to political figures against speech. Bendels’ sentencing has provoked criticism outside of his political circle, with figures like former Green Party leader Ricarda Lang questioning the “proportionality” of the ruling.

    Political speech under fire, from Thailand to Zimbabwe to Russia 

    • American academic Paul Chambers, a Naresuan University lecturer, has lost his visa and is facing trial after the Royal Thai Army accused him of violating Thailand’s oppressive lese-majeste laws. The laws, which ban insults to the country’s monarchy, regularly result in long prison sentences for government critics.
    • Hamas militants tortured a Palestinian man to death after he participated in anti-Hamas protests.
    • A St. Petersburg military court sentenced 67-year-old Soviet-era dissident Alexander Skobov to 16 years in prison for participating in the Free Russia Forum and making a social media post in support of Ukraine.
    • Indian comedian Kunal Kamra is experiencing a wave of retaliation after joking about state leader Eknath Shinde at a comedy club. Kamra is facing multiple criminal charges, including defamation, as well as death threats. But he isn’t backing down — his response on X included a “step-by-step guide” on “How to Kill an Artist.”
    • Zimbabwe police have detained journalist Blessed Mhlanga for weeks on charges of “transmitting information that incites violence or causes damage to property.” He had interviewed a veteran and political figure who called for the resignation of President Emmerson Mnangagwa.
    • Israeli military temporarily blindfolded, handcuffed, and detained filmmaker Hamdan Ballal, best known for the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land,”  while he was receiving medical care after settlers attacked him during Ramadan near his home in the West Bank.
    • Burkina Faso’s military junta is accused of forcibly conscripting journalists who criticized severe press freedom violations in the country.
    • Nigeria’s Borno State arrested a 19-year-old for his viral social media post criticizing public schools in the region and intend to charge him with “ridiculing and bringing down the personality of” the governor.
    • Lawyers representing dissenting voices aren’t free from consequences, either. An Iranian court sentenced a dozen lawyers who provided legal services to clients from the country’s 2022 protest movement to three years in prison on “propaganda” charges. 

    Turkey targets journalists amid protests

    Protesters gather in Istanbul after the detention of the city’s Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu.

    Last month, Turkish police banned protests in Istanbul and arrested the city’s Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, a popular rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The crackdown has extended to the press, too. Authorities arrested BBC correspondent Mark Lowen and deported him for “being a threat to public order,” arrested AFP photographer Yasin Akgül for “taking part in an illegal gathering,” and charged Swedish journalist Kaj Joakim Medin for allegedly “being a member of a terrorist organization” and “insulting” Erdogan. 

    The latest in tech and censorship:

    • Late last month, a massive earthquake struck Myanmar, causing thousands of deaths and injuries. But the country’s military junta nevertheless continued severe restrictions on reporting and internet access, hampering recovery efforts.
    • The Kenyan high court in Nairobi ruled that a lawsuit alleging Meta’s content moderation practices fueled violence in Ethiopia can go forward.
    • Meta says it’s facing “substantial” fines because it “pushed back on requests from the Turkish government to restrict content that is clearly in the public interest” in the aftermath of Mayor Imamoglu’s arrest.
    • Turkish authorities also demanded the social media platform X block hundreds of accounts within the country, to which X partially complied but has since challenged some of the orders “to defend the expression of our users.”
    • X is also challenging the use of a provision of India’s Information Technology Act to issue content takedown orders.
    • India’s Supreme Court, in response to Wikimedia Foundation’s appeal against an order from the Delhi High Court, pushed back against that court’s demand that Wikipedia take down a page detailing Asian News International’s lawsuit against the Foundation.
    • The Investigatory Powers Tribunal issued a ruling opposing the UK government’s attempt to keep secret Apple’s appeal against orders that it offer a backdoor in its encrypted cloud service for users around the world.
    • European Union authorities are reportedly planning to announce penalties including “a fine and demands for product changes” against X for alleged violations under the Digital Services Act.

    Pakistan’s blasphemers still under attack

    Late last month, a Pakistan court sentenced five men to death for posting “blasphemous” content online, a common charge and penalty in Pakistan. But that’s not all. A Pakistani YouTuber is also facing blasphemy charges (not his first) for naming a perfume “295” — a reference to the blasphemy law in the country’s penal code.

    Let’s check back in across the pond…

    Lately, it seems not a day goes by without the UK’s free speech issues hitting the headlines. This month is no different. Here’s the latest:

    • As I’ve written about in recent editions of the Dispatch, the UK has been flirting with enforcement of blasphemy laws in the country. That risk has advanced with the charge of “intent to cause against the religious institution of Islam, harassment, alarm or distress” filed against a man who burned a Quran outside the Turkish consulate in London. The alleged target in the case — the “religious institution of Islam” — is notable.
    • On the other hand, the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority chose not to act on hundreds of complaints filed over an allegedly anti-Christian KFC ad that “depicts a man being baptised in a lake of gravy before transforming into a human-sized chicken nugget.”(Last year, the ASA did act against a comedy tour ad that could cause “serious offence” to Christians.)
    • A lower court in Poole found anti-abortion activist Livia Tossici-Bolt guilty on two charges of breaching a public spaces protection order for standing outside an abortion clinic with a sign that read “Here to talk, if you want.” The court gave her a conditional discharge and ordered her to pay £20,000 (about $27,000) in legal costs.
    • Over 30 police officers arrested six activists from Youth Demand at a Quaker meeting house in London “on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.” One member said the group was “so incensed” by the raid “that they didn’t even offer officers a cup of tea.”
    • Hertfordshire police are conducting a “rapid and thorough review” after the arrest and 11-hour detainment of  a couple on various charges, including harassment and malicious communications because they voiced complaints about their daughter’s school on WhatsApp.
    • The aforementioned arrests are just a drop in the pond — data obtained by The Times found that UK police are detaining around 12,000 people annually for “sending messages that cause ‘annoyance’, ‘inconvenience’ or ‘anxiety’ to others via the internet, telephone or mail.”

    China’s critics targeted in Hong Kong — and Canada 

    Chinese dissident artists Badiucao

    Chinese dissident artist and human rights activist Badiucao holding his Lennon Wall flag that he designed in support of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, October 5, 2019.

    Milan digital gallery Art Innovation is facing criticism for its response to an artist it featured in a short video broadcast on billboards during a recent art fair in Hong Kong. In it, artist, CCP critic, and frequent target of censorship Badiucao mouthed the words, “You must take part in revolution,” a Mao Zedong quote and the title of his new graphic novel. 

    When he announced that he planned to publish a statement about his effort to skirt Hong Kong’s censorship laws, Art Innovation warned him there would “definitely” be legal action if material “against the Chinese government is published.” And in a social media post, the gallery said Badiucao was not upfront about the “nature of the work” so they “can consider it a crime.”

    And that’s not all the news out of Hong Kong. In recent weeks, a 57-year-old man was sentenced to a year in prison for “seditious” social media posts including some calling the Chinese government a “terrorist state” and an “evil axis power.” Police also took in for questioning the parents of U.S.-based democracy activist Frances Hui, who is wanted in Hong Kong on national security charges.

    Hong Kong’s campaign to target its activists is causing a stir elsewhere, too — in Canadian elections. Canadian member of parliament and Liberal Party candidate Paul Chiang stepped down from the April 28 election days after a video of comments he made earlier this year surfaced. In it, Chiang encouraged people to bring Conservative party candidate Joe Tay, who is wanted by Hong Kong authorities, to Toronto’s Chinese consulate to collect a bounty for him.

    P.S. If you enjoyed this newsletter, you may be interested in my book, “Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech.” It comes out Aug. 19 and is now available for pre-order!

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  • Is it ‘hate speech’ to say Jesus needs a haircut?

    Is it ‘hate speech’ to say Jesus needs a haircut?

    Last year, FIRE launched the Free Speech Dispatch, a regular series covering new and continuing censorship trends and challenges around the world. Our goal is to help readers better understand the global context of free expression. 

    Want to make sure you don’t miss an update? Sign up for our newsletter.

    Hate speech sentence for TikToker’s joke about Jesus’ hair

    Is it a crime to joke that Jesus needs a haircut? In Indonesia, the answer is apparently yes. Ratu Thalisa, a popular TikToker in the country, was just sentenced to two years and 10 months in prison after holding up a picture of Jesus in a video and saying, “You should not look like a woman,” adding that he should cut his hair. 

    Thalisa, a trans woman, was responding to a commenter telling her to cut her hair like a man’s. Two days after she posted the video, Christian groups reported her to the police for blasphemy violations and she was soon arrested. She was ultimately found guilty of hate speech against Christianity under Indonesia’s Electronic Information and Transactions law for comments that could affect “public order” and “religious harmony.” 

    Thalisa is one of hundreds found guilty for speech-related offenses under this law in recent years. Similarly, opponents of a demolition project linked to a Roman Catholic diocese in Indonesia now have reason to fear they’ll be targeted under the country’s blasphemy law. The United Catholic Youth Forum, a Catholic group in Indonesia, is pressuring police to arrest a critic who posted a cartoon “depicting a Catholic priest with an excavator,” claiming it “insults the symbol of the Catholic religion.”

    Blasphemous speech remains a target globally

    Rasmus Paludan burning a Quran outside the Turkish embassy in Stockholm in January 2023

    • Greek politician Nikolaos Papadopoulos took his feud against artwork he once criticized as offensive to Orthodox Christianity to a new level this month. The country’s National Gallery had to temporarily close after Papadopoulos partially destroyed four works, caricatures of religious icons from artist Christoforos Katsadiotis, by throwing them on the ground.
    • Pakistan’s Lahore High Court issued a ruling intensifying the country’s attack on VPN use and blasphemous speech online. The ruling “ordered the immediate termination of all types of VPNs, the registration of all social media websites, and the establishment of special courts nationwide” to combat online blasphemy.
    • A Pakistani court sentenced a man to death for “disrespectful remarks against the Holy Prophet.”
    • Last month, I wrote about a man who was arrested “on suspicion of a racially aggravated public order offence” for publicly burning a Quran in Manchester, UK. Another man was arrested on similar charges after burning a Quran outside the Turkish consulate in London. And that’s not all — his expression was also met with violence. An attacker was charged after slashing at the Quran burner with a knife. 

    Online Safety Act, threats to China’s critics, and more out of the UK

    Digital graphic world map hologram on flag of China and blue sky background

    Another charged Quran-burner isn’t the only speech news coming out of the UK. Here’s the latest:

    • The UK’s Online Safety Act has now gone into effect. The law is wide-ranging and, among other things, requires platforms to take measures against and have in place systems for removing content including extreme pornography, racially or religiously aggravated public order offences, controlling or coercive behaviour, and terrorism. Hundreds of small websites — like The Hamster Forum, “the home of all things hamstery” — have already announced they are shutting down out of fear that they will be unable to meet compliance requirements under the law.
    • Earlier this year, the UK shocked privacy advocates when leaks reported that the country’s Home Office demanded Apple offer a backdoor in its encrypted cloud service for users around the world. Apple refused, withdrawing its advanced data protection tool for UK users rather than comply, and responded with an appeal to the country’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal. A hearing was held this month — but it was closed, and media outlets were denied access.
    • Neighbors of Hong Kong activists Tony Chung and Carmen Lau, now living in the UK, received disturbing letters offering £100,000 for “information” on their alleged national security crimes against Hong Kong or, even more shocking, for taking them directly to the Chinese embassy in London. An embassy spokesperson claimed the letters were staged but said that “I also want to stress that it is legitimate and reasonable to pursue wanted fugitives.” Similar letters were sent in Melbourne to the neighbors of Kevin Yam, an Australian citizen also wanted in Hong Kong.

    Facial recognition’s role in censorship 

    Last week, Hungarian MPs passed a law making it “forbidden to hold an assembly in violation” of the country’s 2021 law banning the depiction of homosexuality to minors, making Pride marches illegal in the country. Those who hold or attend Pride parades may now face fines — and police “are also allowed to use facial recognition technology to identify possible offenders.”

    Facial recognition is playing a role in Iran’s censorship and suppression of women, too. To enforce its oppressive forced veiling policies, Iranian authorities use a slew of tools to target women failing to wear hijab. Those tools include drones, a phone app to report unveiled women, and facial recognition tech. 

    Speech about Israel and Gaza continues to be a target for law enforcement and legislators

    Protester is holding a placard that reads ''Freedom of Speech'' while nearly a hundred people are participating in a demonstration to commemorate Palestinian Prisoners Day in Bonn, Germany copy

    • Germany’s State Security Police are investigating an incident during the Berlin International Film Festival, where Hong Kong director Jun Li read out a speech from Iranian actor Erfan Shekarriz, who accused German institutions of supporting “the brutal extermination of the Palestinian people.” The investigation likely rests on the director’s use of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a phrase that has sometimes been criminalized in Germany.
    • In an effort to combat anti-Semitism, New South Wales in Australia has passed new protest and hate speech laws despite some concerns about their breadth. The laws, among other things, restrict protests “near” places of worship and criminalize “intentionally and publicly incit[ing] hatred towards another person, or group of people, on the grounds of race.”
    • Canadian writer and activist Yves Engler was hit with harassment and indecent communication charges late last month over comments he made in reply to media figure Dahlia Kurtz on X last summer. Engler said “Racist Dahlia supports killing Palestinian children. 20,000 is not enough she wants even more Palestinian blood spilled.” Engler then alleged he was hit with a new set of charges for writing about the initial ones. Engler spent five days in jail before being released.
    • Universities Australia, the representative body for Australia’s higher education institutions, agreed upon a new definition of anti-Semitism to be adopted across its 39 universities after urging from the Australian Senate to create one that “closely aligns” with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition. (FIRE has expressed concerns about enforcement of the IHRA definition on U.S. campuses and its potential to chill or censor protected speech about Israel.)
    • Saying “freedom of expression underpins everything we do at LSE,” the London School of Economics rejected a campaign to cancel a talk for the book “Understanding Hamas and Why That Matters.” Israeli ambassador Tzipi Hotovely had sent a letter to LSE calling for the event cancellation, writing that she was “deeply concerned that the event is providing a platform for Hamas propaganda — a terror organisation proscribed under United Kingdom law.”

    Record high internet shutdowns in 2024

    As Dispatch readers know, many of the most pressing free speech fights today take place over how, and whether, we can speak freely online. A new report from Access Now revealed that 2024 was the worst year yet for internet shutdowns, finding 296 shutdowns in 54 countries, with seven new countries using the tactic for the first time compared to 2023. The most shutdowns occurred in Myanmar, India, Pakistan, Russia, and Ukraine, with some of those shutdowns imposed by other nations and actors.

    Prison for a ‘false post,’ satirical cartoon blocked in India, and more speech news out of the Middle East and Asia 

    • An elderly Malaysian man was sentenced to six months in prison after failing to pay a fine punishing him for posting “false content” about the king of Malaysia.
    • Kyrgyzstan recriminalized libel and insult on the internet and in the media. Now, “complaints will be handled by police and adjudicated by so-called administrative courts in an expedited format” and new fines will be assessed for violations.
    • Police handling online crime in India’s Maharashtra state sent a notice to the Wikimedia Foundation to remove “objectionable” content from the Wikipedia page for Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj, a king in 17th century India.
    • There’s more Wikipedia news out of India. The Wikimedia Foundation is asking India’s Supreme Court to reverse an order directing Wikipedia to take down a page about its legal dispute with an Indian news agency. The underlying dispute centers on a Wiki entry describing the outlet as a government “propaganda tool.”
    • And India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology reportedly blocked the website of Tamil-language weekly magazine Ananda Vikatan over a satirical cartoon depicting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in chains behind President Donald Trump.
    • Vietnamese scholar and journalist Truong Huy San, who goes by the pen name Huy Duc, was sentenced to 30 months in prison for Facebook posts “abusing democratic freedoms to infringe upon the interests of the state.”
    • An escalation in President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s campaign against his opponents and critics, Turkish police just arrested Istanbul’s mayor and popular Erdogan rival Ekrem Imamoglu and banned protests for four days in Istanbul.
    • Two of Singapore’s government ministers have filed a libel suit against Bloomberg over the outlet’s reporting about real estate in Singapore. Under the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act, Singapore previously ordered Bloomberg to issue a “correction direction” on its reporting, which the outlet did with a note that it was done “under threat of sanction.”

    Guilty finding in egregious case of transnational repression in the U.S.

    Iranian journalist and womens rights activist Masih Alinejad at the Time Women of the Year Gala in 2023

    Last week, two men were found guilty of a plot to murder Iranian-American journalist and activist Masih Alinejad in New York City. Alleged Russian mob members Rafat Amirov and Polad Omarov were found guilty of charges including murder for hire, firearms possession and conspiracy to commit money laundering. 

    Prosecutors accused the Iranian government of putting a $500,000 bounty on Alinejad and of other plots to harm her. The case is yet another disturbing reminder that oppressive regimes overseas are attempting to silence speech — and critics — within U.S. borders.

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