We have written several posts about freedom of speech in Germany and noted in one that the German counterpart of the legal term "freedom of speech" is "freedom of opinion".
Said a smirking German: That means we have absolute freedom of opinion, you can have whatever opinion you want - as long as you don't utter it. We shouldn't be too nit picking, though, because the US Supreme Court declared that money is speech, so we are even.
Today, we'll write once again about German comedian Mr. Nuhr who recently went to court to have the authorities forbid a citizen to call him a "hate preacher". Mr. Nuhr failed in his attempt.
Before you read on, the blogster would like to admit that the K-Landnews does not find Mr. Nuhr funny and tried to convey this in the post "Comedy by numbers and comedy with numbers".
A week or so ago, we were surprised to see an article in the 'business' section of Frankfurter Allgemeine on the Greek debt crisis entitled "Dieter Nuhr is right". A few quick searches found the reference. After the Greek referendum which saw a majority of voters say "No" to the proposed bailout package, meaning a majority of Greek citizens did not want to see austerity policies continued and comply with loan payback demands.
Mr. Nuhr went on Twitter to comment: My family and I had a vote with a majority against continuing to pay our mortgage. The people have spoken.
The tweet supposedly triggered wave of outrage, or - to use the German word for it - a Shitstorm. The German translation of "shit storm" is Shitstorm, revealing a simple rule for creating new German words: make a compound and capitalize the first letter.
Then, on 17 July, Mr. Nuhr got to write a piece in the same paper: "Report from the Shitstorm - We live in the Digital Middle Ages". The lead-in says we are on the way back to the Middle Ages. Why? Let's begin with an example. What follows is first a repeat of his tweet, then a complaint about how Greece is breaking a contract by voting against the bailout, and next a long diatribe about how users on Twitter and Facebook insulted Mr. Nuhr.
At this point, the blogster thought, wait a second, this is all about him. We went back to he episode described in "Comedy by numbers", re-read articles and tweets. After this, the blogster slogged through hundreds and hundreds of tweets published in reaction to "the people have spoken" as well as an equally large number of tweets that appeared in reaction to the "digital Middle Ages" piece.
One paragraph in Mr. Nuhr's "middle ages" article is titled: I lack the power.
There are hundreds of millions of Twitter or Facebook users who do not have power but he is not one of them.
The number of social media users who can call up one of the big four or five newspapers in the country and get ample space to air their plight is likely to be on the order or one millionth of one percent.
The conclusion: it is all about him.
There were indeed some nasty tweets, but there was plenty of agreement, too. If someone out there feels like automating the responses, I'd love to see the results. Nothing we have seen is even remotely close to the kind of abuse hurled social media users who have no power.
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