Widespread Backlash Against Germany’s New Law For Tackling Online Hate Speech

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Widespread Backlash Against Germany’s New Law For Tackling Online Hate Speech
Widespread Backlash Against Germany’s New Law For Tackling Online Hate Speech

Germany’s relationship with the concept of free speech remains complicated.  Given its history, censorship of any kind is banned in the country, but it is equally acutely sensitive to the dangers of hate speech.

Germany’s laws penalize all acts that involve incitement of hatred or violence against a person or an ethnic group with jail time of up to five years. Similarly denying the Holocaust is against the law as is displaying the swastika or giving a “Heil Hitler” salute.

However, ensuring a balance between these two convictions has been hard for its government, particularly in the online medium.

Its latest attempt to regulate the online space is the introduction of the Net Enforcement Law (NetzDG), which came into full effect on Jan. 1,2018.

The law has however backfired on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government, with critics on both sides pointing out that it censors free expression while doing little to stop the spread of real hate.

Law Mandates Quick Removal of Offensive Material

Under the laws,  every social media platform having 2 million or more users in Germany must comply with German anti-hate laws and quickly remove illegal material.

Sites have around 24 hours after posts are flagged by users to remove “obviously illegal” content . There are around 20 items listed in this category. In other more “complex” cases, the sites have a week to resolve the issue. Failing to do so can result in a fine of $60 million (€50 million ).

The law was enacted last year as virulent propaganda and hate speech, including fake news, spread across German social networks, against the backdrop of  the 2015 refugee crisis and the decision by Merkel to open Germany’s borders, allowing entry to nearly 1.2 million migrants, most of them Muslims.

In the past year, the number of criminal investigations into online hate speech has gone up by 50 percent in Berlin alone.

Some of this spike in online hatred can be attributed to the success of the far-right nativist party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, which in the latest election won 12.6 percent of the vote making it the third-largest party in the Bundestag.

Indiscriminate Censoring  By Social Media Companies

The law’s implementation has drawn censure across the board.

In one instance , AfD politician Beatrix von Storch questioned on Twitter a tweet by the police department of a German state North-Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), which had wished citizens, in several languages including Arabic, a Happy New Year.

Von Storch’s tweet railed against this, asking why an official police account was tweeting in Arabic.

The next day von Storch’s tweet was not to be found on Twitter and her account was also blocked for 12 hours. A similar tweet by Alice Weidel, another member of the AfD, also vanished.

Subsequently, a German satire magazine Titanic decided to issue a series of tweets mocking the politician. Twitter deleted these messages as well, and shut down the publication’s account for two days.

Germany’s national association of journalists as well as the federal association of German newspaper publishers criticized the “censorship” alleging that social media networks were deleting messages “by default” in order to avoid fines.

Repeal Or Reform Law

Many in the country are calling for the law to be either reformed or repealed, stating that it was not working in its current form.

In the Bundestag, Germany’s legislative house, several parties including the liberal Free Democratic party, and the environmentalist Greens have joined the Alternative for Germany in calling for a repeal of the new law.

Merkel’s Center-Right party, which is currently negotiating a coalition partnership with center-left Social Democrats over the formation of a new government, has said that it will review the law in several months’ time.

Tim Wolff, editor-in-chief of Titanic said that the law had  “a very German approach to the problem”, noting that the tendency in the country was to hide “the ugly parts” of its society. Additionally, the “old German tradition of ‘humorlessness’” meant that it assumed that it was better to “eliminate irony altogether” rather than risking “some misunderstanding.”

In Wolff’s opinion,  the Net Enforcement Law is a clash between two fundamentally different approaches to free speech: The more narrow German version is coming up against the American commercial attitude of “everyone can say what they want, unless it hurts business.”

Free Speech Monitoring Outsourced To Private Companies 

Frank Uberall, president of the German journalists association, has stated that the main problem with regards to the Net Enforcement Law was that it was outsourcing  free speech to commercial enterprises.

He stated that the government must crack down on the illegal activities online related to hate speech and fake news, but the job can’t be done by private companies who are “unable, or unwilling”, to hire enough “qualified employees” to handle the problem.

Facebook has announced it will be hiring more people to deal with complaints arising from the new legislation, but already it’s over 1,000 German moderators are swamped. In the first week alone, they have so far had to process hundreds of thousands of cases.

Neither Twitter nor Facebook have commented on the issue publicly.

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