If the internet is to be believed, 1,000 immigrants—many of them refugees from Syria—descended on the center of the German city of Dortmund on New Year’s Eve in 2016. Aggregating even wilder online reports, Politically Incorrect News, a German far-right web site, wrote that “the invading hordes” shouted “Allahu Akbar” as 1,000 men “threw fireworks at the police” and at a local church.

The internet, of course, is not to be believed.

There really were scores of immigrants in the center of Dortmund to celebrate the beginning of the new year. Many did launch fireworks, as is customary in most Western cities. But video footage from the day shows that they neither attacked the police nor tried to burn down the church. By the time mainstream outlets reported the facts, the damage had long since been done. Tens of thousands of people had seen the false rumors on Twitter and Facebook.

In Germany, public discourse is much less freewheeling than it is in the United States. After World War II, the fledgling Federal Republic developed a strong social prohibition against racist and inflammatory rhetoric. Mainstream media outlets worked within much stricter boundaries of good taste and moderate opinion. And since Germany—like most European countries—doesn’t have an equivalent of the First Amendment, the state gradually began to enforce this consensus with all of its coercive powers.

As a result, the limits on what citizens can do and say in the country are now remarkably rigid. In the United States, many people know that to use Nazi symbols in Germany, to deny the Holocaust, or to inveigh against foreigners is to risk prison. But few realize that even to call a politician a liar or an asshole is to invite a costly defamation suit. (A few years ago, a friend of my mother’s had to pay a big fine for flipping off a motorist who cut her off when she was cycling to work.) In short, German politicians have long believed that censorship is a necessary response to hate, and the German people have learned to tolerate, as it were, greater limits on their freedom of expression than most in the West.