SPRINGFIELD, Ohio —The woman behind an early Facebook post spreading a harmful and baseless claim about Haitian immigrants eating local pets that helped thrust a small Ohio city into the national spotlight says she had no firsthand knowledge of any such incident and is now filled with regret and fear as a result of the ensuing fallout.
“It just exploded into something I didn’t mean to happen,” Erika Lee, a Springfield resident, told NBC News on Friday.
Lee recently posted on Facebook about a neighbor’s cat that went missing, adding that the neighbor told Lee she thought the cat was the victim of an attack by her Haitian neighbors.
Free speech can exist perfectly fine with rules against this kind of stuff. In a lot of western countries where racism and hatespeech can get you in trouble, you are still totally allowed to criticize cultures, immigrants and other stuff like that.
I’d love a list of examples by country and their specificities? If not it just feels like you’re saying, “your free speech is too free”?
Specificities?
A few out of the top of my head: France, Belgium, UK, Netherlands, Germany, Canada, Australia.
In all of these countries free speech is a right, but blatant racism, hate speech, or propaganda based upon such basis, can all get you fined and possibly even jailed.
Yeah, that’s pretty general. If you’d like to pick a country and a few example cases I’d love to actually be specific. Burden of proof on the prosecution? Can I just say my neighbor said racist shit and they go to jail? Context? Set list of phrases/words? Past precedent and public opinion? Warnings vs fines? Etc?
Pretty sure a lot of these places let a lot of questionable people gather and say a lot of questionable shit publicly without any consequence. Not just the US.