Since nobody started a thread i though it might be a good idea to do so.
I don't know how much this is a subject of debate in the rest of the world, but in Germany and Turkey this is one of the main debates in the last couple of weeks. Everything started a while ago when a relatively harmless satire-magazine made a song about Erdogan. This song was pretty harmless and it should be mentioned that they make songs about all politicians, while using prominent songs. There was for example "Hier kommt Alex" about our minister of transport. Now they made "Erdowie, Erdowann, Erdogan". As song you can watch here with an English translation: . Despite the fact that the song is not insulting at all because it doesn't use swearwords and is only using video footage which already existed of Erdogan, the German ambassador in Turkey was called in and it was demanded to delete the clip. In the past debate about the the german population laughed about Erdogans reaction and was pretty much entirely behind the german magazin, because that's clearly within the freedom of speech. To see how moderate and harmless those guys were another satirist made an even more provocant clip. Within it, he says that the previous song about Erdogan was pretty harmless and is within the freedom of speech. Than he continues and explains something that would be forbidden in Germany is to call Erdogan someone who plays with goats (the more drastic variant of course) and continues with a series of different insults. Now we have in our law a paragraph who is by popular term called the Shah-paragraph because he was the consequence of insults against the back than persian ruler. Despite being never really used now after 50 years we have the problem that Erdogan has the chance to bring the Satirist in to prison for 3 years. Nobody believes that this is going to happen, but Erdogans lawyers at least started to sue that man.
The following debate should discuss where political satire starts and where it ends and weather Erdogan overreacts in his way to not accept anyone who speaks about him.
In my opinion i am reminded at the insult processes in the roman empire only that today nobody is going to be executed for it, while insulting the emperor could clearly result in that.
Here is also an english article about the entire matter: