German Law Compels Facebook to Scrub Off the Hate
interference in elections or developers misusing people’s information, we didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibilities,” he said.
In the country of the Holocaust, the commitment against hate speech is as fierce as the commitment to free speech. Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” is only available in an annotated version. Swastikas are illegal. Inciting hatred is punishable by up to five years in jail.
But banned posts, pictures and videos have routinely lingered on Facebook and other social media platforms. Now companies that systematically fail to remove “obviously illegal” content within 24 hours face fines of up to 50 million euros.
The deletion center predates the legislation, but its efforts have taken on new urgency. Every day content moderators in Berlin, hired by a third-party firm and working exclusively on Facebook, pore over thousands of posts flagged by users as upsetting or potentially illegal and make a judgment: Ignore, delete or, in particularly tricky cases, “escalate” to a global team of Facebook lawyers with expertise in German regulation.
Some decisions to delete are easy. Posts about Holocaust denial and genocidal rants against particular groups like refugees are obvious ones for taking down.
Others are less so. On December 31, the day before the new law took effect, a far-right lawmaker reacted to an Arabic New Year’s tweet from the Cologne police, accusing them of appeasing “barbaric, Muslim, gang-raping groups of men.”
The request to block a screenshot of the lawmaker’s post wound up in the queue of Nils, a 35-year- old agent in the Berlin deletion center. His judgment was to let it stand. A colleague thought it should come down.
Ultimately, the post was sent to lawyers in Dublin, London, Silicon Valley and Hamburg. By the afternoon it had been deleted, prompting a storm of criticism about the new legislation, known here as the “Facebook Law.”
“A lot of stuff is clear- cut,” Nils said. Facebook, citing his safety, did not allow him to give his surname. “But then there is the borderline stuff.”
Complicated cases have raised concerns that the threat of steep fines and a 24-hour window for making decisions encourage “over-blocking” by companies.
The far-right Alternative of Germany, a noisy and prolific user of social media, has been quick to proclaim “the end of free speech.” Human rights organizations have warned that the legislation was in- spiring authoritarian governments to copy it.
Other people argue that the law simply gives a private company too much authority to decide what constitutes illegal hate speech in a democracy, an argument that Facebook, which favored voluntary guidelines, made against the law.
“It is perfectly appropriate for the German government to set standards,” said Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president of communications and public policy. “But we think it’s a bad idea for the German government to outsource the decision of what is lawful and what is not.”
Richard Allan, Facebook’s vice president for public policy in Europe, put it more simply: “We don’t want to be the arbiters of free speech.”
German officials counter that social media platforms are the arbiters anyway. It all comes down to one question, said Gerd Billen, secretary of state in Germany’s Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection. “Who is sovereign? Parliament or Facebook?”
When Nils applied for a job at the deletion center, the first question the recruiter asked him was: “Do you know what you will see here?”
Nils has seen it all. Child torture. Mutilations. Suicides. Even murder: He once saw a video of a man cutting a heart out of a living human being. And then there is hate. “You see all the ugliness of the world here,” Nils said. “Everyone is against everyone else. Everyone is complaining about that other group. And everyone is saying the same horrible things.”
The issue is deeply personal for Nils. He has a 4-year- old daughter. “I’m also doing this for her,” he said.
The center is run by Arvato, a service provider owned by the conglomerate Bertelsmann. The agents review content from a handful of countries.
“Two agents looking at the same post should come up with the same decision,” says Karsten König, who manages Arvato’s partnership with Facebook.
The Berlin center opened with 200 employees in 2015, as Germany was opening its doors to refugees. Posts calling the refugees rapists, Neanderthals and scum survived for weeks, according to jugendschutz. net, a publicly funded internet safety organization. Many were never taken down. Researchers at the group reported a tripling in observed hate speech in the second half of 2015.
Mr. Billen was alarmed. In September 2015, he convened executives from Facebook and other social media companies. A task force to fight hate speech was formed. A couple of months later, the companies signed a joint declaration, promising to “examine flagged content and block or delete the majority of illegal posts within 24 hours.”
But the problem did not go away. Over the 15 months that followed, independent researchers, hired by the government, twice posed as ordinary users and flagged illegal hate speech. During the tests, they found that Facebook had deleted 46 percent and 39 percent.
“They knew that they were a platform for criminal behavior and for calls to commit criminal acts, but they presented themselves to us as a wolf in sheep skin,” said Mr. Billen.
By March 2017, the German government had lost patience and started drafting legislation. The Network Enforcement Law was born, setting out 21 types of content that are “manifestly illegal” and requiring platforms to act quickly.
Facebook’s performance on removing illegal hate speech in Germany rose to 100 percent over the past year, according to the latest spot check of the European Union.
At Facebook’s Berlin offices, Mr. Allan acknowledged that under the earlier voluntary agreement, the company had not acted decisively enough at first.
“It was too little and it was too slow,” he said. But, he added, “that has changed.”
The reason for the improvement was not German legislation, he said, but a voluntary code of conduct with the European Union.
Facebook’s results have improved in all European countries, not just in Germany, Mr. Allan said.
“There was no need for legislation,” he said. Mr. Billen disagrees. “They could have prevented the law,” he said. YouTube scored 90 percent in last year’s monitoring exercise. If other platforms had done the same, there would be no law today, he said.
Germany’s hard-line approach to hate speech and data privacy once made it an outlier in Europe. “For us, data protection is a fundamental right that underpins our democratic institutions,” Mr. Billen said.
Now the stance of many other governments toward Facebook has hardened since it emerged that the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had harvested the personal data of up to 87 million users.
The European Commission is considering German- style legislation for online content related to terrorism, violent extremism and child pornography.
And Germany’s influence is evident in Europe’s new privacy regulation, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, or G. D. P. R. The rules give people control over how their information is collected and used.
“There is now a sense of urgency and the conviction that we are dealing with something very dangerous that may threaten the development of free democracies,” said the European Union’s justice commissioner, Vera Jourova, who is also trying to find ways to clamp down on fake news and disinformation campaigns while protecting the data of over 500 million Europeans.
Ms. Jourova, who grew up behind the Iron Curtain in what is now the Czech Republic, had long been skeptical about governments legislating any aspect of free speech. Her father lost his job after making a comment about the Soviet invasion in 1968, barring her from going to university until she married and took her husband’s name.
“I lived half my life in the atmosphere driven by Soviet propaganda,” she said. “The golden principle was: If you repeat a lie a hundred times it becomes the truth.”
At the deletion center, every so often someone breaks down. A mother recently left her desk in tears after watching a video of a child being sexually abused. A young man felt physically sick after seeing a video of a dog being tortured. The agents watch teenagers self-mutilating and girls recounting rape.
They have weekly group sessions with a psychologist and the trauma specialists on standby. In more serious cases, the center teams up with clinics in Berlin.
But there is a camaraderie in the office and a real sense of mission: Nils said the agents were proud to “help clean up the hate.”