During the last few months, I've spent quite some time on a social media site, gained lots of followers, and learnt a lot about political life in America that you usually cannot easily learn in Manhattan.

Manhattan is pretty much apolitical. Often that's a good thing, everything boils down to functionality: Can you hack it here? Are you a decent person? Are you working on improving yourself? Just being a pain in the ass and demanding to be taken care of makes you look ridiculous. Likewise, many people keep their political beliefs to themselves. In Berlin, small talk can quickly escalate to more severe topics -- which makes it hard to find superficial friendliness. Especially if you do not want to come out of the closet since the person you started a conversation with is just turning out to a) feel strongly about a particular topic and b) signalling they are not good at handling dissent.

Americans are nowhere near as aggressive about their own beliefs as Germans are. They find it easy to keep them to themselves in order to just get along, and they respect other opinions. Germans haven't enjoyed freedom of speech in generations; and as a result, they have problems respecting opinions other than those they agree with.

You may think the elections campaign currently going on in the US to be hilarious, weird, funny, or a wholesale train wreck -- it's lame compared to the German equivalent. Their campaign has everything, gag orders for the media and the police, dirty methods that would Mafiosi blush, and uncivilized discourse on TV shows you would expect in certain Eastern European parliaments. When they are drunk.

As mentioned at the beginning, I enjoyed social media. It was fun while it lasted: They are collapsing into censorship.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel (who, like me, grew up with the insane censorship under East German communism, but apparently, unlike me, did did not develop a horror for it) has lobbied Facebook and Twitter to crack down on dissenting views, and they were happy to comply. Merkel is trying to force her unpopular policies down people's throats by silencing them.

I've seen this before, so I am not too scared, but it sure irks me, even more so because I've raised my standards massively, thanks to living in a country that fought a war for it's independence.

It's weird watching Americans try come to terms with this social media censorship. They try to find some internal logic to this: Shouldn't the more extremist writers be silenced before the more moderate ones? Why are death threats against others okaf if you are leftist and grounds for lifetime bans if you are not?

Aside from the architects of censorship being old Stasi professionals, there is no system to this. Censorship is always meant to be random, irrational, intimidating, unpredictable. The resulting paranoia is intentional. You are supposed to mostly censor yourself. Punishment will ensue if you failed to use the 'scissors in your own head', as East Germans used to call that.

Nobody is going to take you aside to explain the rules to you. You figure out a few things, develop a way around what you think the obstacle is, and just wing it: I used to copy books by hand, since I couldn't afford to take photographs of each page, and even if I had been, I was certain somebody in the photo lab would have put me on some list, destroyed the photos, and messed up my life in unpredictable ways. It takes a week to copy a book by hand, in case you want to know. Nope, xerox machines did not exist under the glorious system of socialism.

I have some faith the Twitter stockholders and advertising customers will punish this Anti-American insanity harshly. In the meantime, I think I'll be better off migrating to some Russian network.