Freedom of speech and censorship : an European point of view.

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I read today with some amazement the last administrative advisement of @GoAskAlice. In Europe, there is not something like a first amendment permitting to tell any stupidity on very controversial topics without risking to be sentenced by the justice. Let me give you a very recent example. A few days ago, after the attack of a supermarket in Southern France where a gendarme was killed, a far left politician who had been a candidate at the last election of our National Assembly, twitted : «Each time a gendarme is taken out, and it is not every day, I think at my friend Rémi Fraisse (an environmentalist militant killed accidentally by a grenade from a gendarme in 2014], here it is a colonel, awesome ! Incidentally, it is an elector less for Macron.» It is never right to be happy of the death of a soldier, and in this case, this one, who worked for the GIGN, the equivalent of the SWAT in the French gendarmerie, worked in the Republican Guard, and got a medal as a paratrooper in Iraq, acted like a hero : he asked to replace a hostage in the hope to neutralize the terrorist ; his phone was opened, transmitting information to the police. Sadly, his colleagues did not managed to save him on time. He received a national tribute yesterday. The leader of his party said about the author of the tweet «This stupid harms us terribly. It is a pain for us to see somebody using our name to tell nonsense like this.» Since 2015 we have had 250 persons killed or harmed by terrorists, and being happy when an army officer is killed by a sick Muslim terrorist is even worse. The justice decided that the tweet was an apology for terrorism, and he was sentenced yesterday to a one year suspended prison sentence. He would have got a similar if not stronger sentence in Germany, Spain, Italy... In UK such a tweet would have been borderline, but probably legal as long as he was not asking to kill. My opinion is that any stupid telling ignominious words just deserves to be sentenced like this one. And that GAA had not to issue an administrative advisement to justify himself. I trust completely the administration of myLot and know that they are doing their best to regulate this place and maintain it healthy. No justification needed ! Photo : The Republican Guard waiting for the car of President Macron on the garden side of the Elysée Palace yesterday morning. I asked their authorization to take this picture. Bad that a drop of water felt on the camera lens at this moment, it was raining cats and dogs on Paris yesterday.