Comment by SanjayMehta
12 hours ago
They classify Germany and the UK as democracies. That's precious. Germany has sanctioned its own journalists as has the UK. I don't remember the number of ordinary citizens arrested in Germany for social media posts but I know the UK number was 12000 per year.
Now let's look at the US:
Tucker Carlson is under the gun for allegedly being a Russian or is it Iranian agent. But the US is a democracy.
https://www.newsweek.com/tucker-carlson-foreign-agent-charge...
Do you have a source for the 12k arrested in the UK?
I'm asking because all I could find was a list on Twitter that didn't cite any sources itself and also had very implausible numbers (including he 12k/year for the UK). Implausible based on the lived reality of friends of mine living in e.g. the UK or Germany.
Its an extrapolation based upon UK government arrest figures. It assumes everyone arrested ended up in jail. I have no idea if that is true or not but there are already plenty of documented cases of jail time for social media posts. Hope this helps.
PS 12k a year is more people than Russia jails a year for speech violations.
And I want to know the social media posts they got arrested for
How does it matter?
You can't go around exporting your flavour of free speech at the point of a gun while arresting your own people for yapping on X.
The definition of hypocrisy.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2025/09/09/people-a...
> Germany has sanctioned its own journalists
If we're talking about the same case, the EU sanctioned him, the man is at least dual citizen, and received Russian funds via his media company in Turkey, then proceeded to say it was all because it was about his coverage of Gaza. All of that is in the EU sanctions page, but "democratic" media coverage focused and pinned it on the Gaza bit.
If you're talking about Thomas Röper (of Anti-Spiegel) and Alina Lipp, well, it's even more clear cut, not sure how are you trying to sell legal action against those as lack of democracy. It's disingenuous in the best case.
Regarding UK, the 12k figure is real but related to all forms of communication, and by large involving threats, domestic violence and the like. Not for "social media posts".
>Tucker Carlson is under the gun for allegedly being a Russian or is it Iranian agent. But the US is a democracy.
Tucker Carlson took the grifter turn and makes money off it, not unlike Alex Jones. He'll behave like anything that can bring him manageable and profitable attention.
One sided sanctions on journalists for publishing is a sign of autocracy, something you'd expect Idi Amin to do, but then it's Germany, I guess the Austrian influence still exists after 90 years.
>everything I don't like is Nazi
Calling autocracy the sanctioning someone for being on the literal payroll of RT, state media of a hostile country where extrajudicial executions of journalists were commonplace before Roscomnadzor was given near absolute powers over media is, again, a very hard sell.
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