German minister’s own goal

– Germany’s justice minister has fallen victim to the rules he himself championed against online social media, as one of his tweets was deleted following several complaints, Bild daily reported on Monday.

The tweet was from 2010, when Heiko Maas was not yet minister. In it he called Thilo Sarrazin, a politician who wrote a controversial book on Muslim immigrants, “an idiot”. Maas told Bild on Monday “there are things that I would no longer tweet today. I’ve learnt that over the years”.

A new law that came into force on January 1 requires

Berlin

social media giants to remove hate speech and other illegal content, or risk fines of up to €50 million (R703 million). Under the legislation, companies like Twitter and Facebook have 24 hours to remove posts that violate German law after they are flagged.

Germany adopted the measure, one of the world’s toughest, after a surge in racist and incendiary speech online, particularly since the arrival of more than one million asylum-seekers since 2015.

Far-right politician Beatriz von Storch became the first high-profile individual to run afoul of the new rules, and one of her posts was deleted from Twitter and Facebook. Von Storch, deputy leader of the anti-immigration AfD party’s parliamentary group, criticised Cologne police for sending a new year greeting in Arabic on Twitter. “Why is an official police site... tweeting in Arabic?” she wrote. “Did you mean to placate the barbaric, Muslim, gang-raping hordes of men?”

Critics of the new law argue that it stifles freedom of speech. Several parties want it scrapped or amended. –