Delete Hate Speech or Pay Up, Germany Tells Social Media Companies
Delete Hate Speech or Pay Up, Germany Tells Social Media
Companies
By MELISSA EDDY and MARK SCOTT JUNE 30, 2017
BERLIN — Social media companies operating in Germany face
fines of as much as $57 million if they do not delete illegal, racist or
slanderous comments and posts within 24 hours under a law passed on Friday.
The law reinforces Germany’s position as one of the most
aggressive countries in the Western world at forcing companies like Facebook,
Google and Twitter to crack down on hate speech and other extremist messaging
on their digital platforms.
But the new rules have also raised questions about
freedom of expression. Digital and human rights groups, as well as the
companies themselves, opposed the law on the grounds that it placed limits on
individuals’ right to free expression. Critics also said the legislation
shifted the burden of responsibility to the providers from the courts, leading
to last-minute changes in its wording.
Technology companies and free speech advocates argue that
there is a fine line between policy makers’ views on hate speech and what is
considered legitimate freedom of expression, and social networks say they do
not want to be forced to censor those who use their services. Silicon Valley
companies also deny that they are failing to meet countries’ demands to remove
suspected hate speech online.
Still, German authorities pressed ahead with the
legislation. Germany witnessed an increase in racist comments and
anti-immigrant language after the arrival of more than a million migrants,
predominantly from Muslim countries, since 2015, and Heiko Maas, the justice
minister who drew up the draft legislation, said on Friday that it ensured that
rules that currently apply offline would be equally enforceable in the digital
sphere.
“With this law, we put an end to the verbal law of the
jungle on the internet and protect the freedom of expression for all,” Mr. Maas
said. “We are ensuring that everyone can express their opinion freely, without
being insulted or threatened.”
“That is not a limitation, but a prerequisite for freedom
of expression,” he continued.
The law will take effect in October, less than a month
after nationwide elections, and will apply to social media sites with more than
two million users in Germany.
It will require companies including Facebook, Twitter and
Google, which owns YouTube, to remove any content that is illegal in Germany —
such as Nazi symbols or Holocaust denial — within 24 hours of it being brought
to their attention.
The law allows for up to seven days for the companies to
decide on content that has been flagged as offensive, but that may not be
clearly defamatory or inciting violence. Companies that persistently fail to
address complaints by taking too long to delete illegal content face fines that
start at 5 million euros, or $5.7 million, and could rise to as much as €50
million.
Every six months, companies will have to publicly report
the number of complaints they have received and how they have handled them.
In Germany, which has some of the most stringent
anti-hate speech laws in the Western world, a study published this year found
that Facebook and Twitter had failed to meet a national target of removing 70
percent of online hate speech within 24 hours of being alerted to its presence.
The report noted that while the two companies eventually
erased almost all of the illegal hate speech, Facebook managed to remove only
39 percent within 24 hours, as demanded by the German authorities. Twitter met
that deadline in 1 percent of instances. YouTube fared significantly better,
removing 90 percent of flagged content within a day of being notified.
Facebook said on Friday that the company shared the
German government’s goal of fighting hate speech and had “been working hard” to
resolve the issue of illegal content. The company announced in May that it
would nearly double, to 7,500, the number of employees worldwide devoted to
clearing its site of flagged postings. It was also trying to improve the
processes by which users could report problems, a spokesman said.
Twitter declined to comment, while Google did not
immediately respond to a request for comment.
The standoff between tech companies and politicians is
most acute in Europe, where freedom of expression rights are less comprehensive
than in the United States, and where policy makers have often bristled at
Silicon Valley’s dominance of people’s digital lives.
But advocacy groups in Europe have raised concerns over
the new German law.
Mirko Hohmann and Alexander Pirant of the Global Public
Policy Institute in Berlin criticized the legislation as “misguided” for
placing too much responsibility for deciding what constitutes unlawful content
in the hands of social media providers.
“Setting the rules of the digital public square,
including the identification of what is lawful and what is not, should not be
left to private companies,” they wrote.
Even in the United States, Facebook and Google also have
taken steps to limit the spread of extremist messaging online, and to prevent
“fake news” from circulating. That includes using artificial intelligence to
remove potentially extremist material automatically and banning news sites
believed to spread fake or misleading reports from making money through the
companies’ digital advertising platforms.
A version of this article appears in print on July 1,
2017, on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Germany Tells Sites
to Delete Hate or Pay Up.
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