Can a law make social media less hateful? Germany is trying it

BERLIN — When 32-year-old German teacher and academic book author Bahar Aslan took to Twitter last week to accuse authorities of not doing enough to investigate an alleged xenophobic murder potentially committed by police officers, she hardly assumed that in doing so she would soon be accused of having broken the law, too. After all, freedom of speech is enshrined in the German Constitution.

But her tweet soon disappeared, and Aslan says Twitter later messaged her saying she had violated Germany’s hate crime law. Aslan was not alone. She and hundreds of other affected social media users have voiced criticism and concerns about censorship over the controversial new social media law that took effect Jan. 1. Originally conceived to fight online hate crimes, it has quickly evolved into a prime example of a well-intended law gone wrong, its critics are saying. But the German government continues to defend its efforts as one of the world’s most progressive steps to combat the rise in online hate crimes, including defamation and verbal threats.

At the core of the tensions between Facebook or Twitter and the German government are more fundamental differences about the role of social networks in the public sphere. Whereas Germany argues that social networks are private companies and should be responsible for removing illegal remarks on their platforms themselves, Facebook and Twitter consider themselves to be public platforms. They fear the German government is effectively privatizing law enforcement online, and putting it into the hands of companies ill-equipped to regulate speech.

“Social networks are no charity organizations that guarantee freedom of speech in their terms of service,” said Gerd Billen, an undersecretary in Germany’s justice and consumer protection ministry, in a written response. Social networks, he said, had to comply with German law and not only with their own rules.

“We cannot simply accept the fact that illegal Fake News impact our democratic elections or that [online] hate crimes poison our public discourse,” Billen said.

The law forces major social networks to withhold certain comments or posts from users in the country if they are deemed illegal and offensive and were reported by users. Social networks such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram now face fines if they fail to comply with a 24-hour deadline in the most pressing cases.

The legislation was introduced amid a recent spike in online hate speech — reported cases multiplied threefold within the past three years — and complaints by authorities that the sheer volume of incidents has become difficult to prosecute. Posts which are now being removed by Twitter, Facebook and other social networks under the new legislation are still available in other countries but are being withheld within Germany.

But critics, such as the NGO Reporters without Borders, fear social networks are not just removing posts which clearly include hate speech such as death threats or defamation. The law’s opponents believe the social networks are opting to remove more posts than necessary over fears of fines or to deliberately derail the legislation. Twitter and Facebook denied those accusations.