Vandals Deface Facebook's Hamburg Offices (google.com)

Reuters reports that 15 to 20 vandals dressed in black this weekend defaced Facebook's Hamburg offices, spray-painting "Facebook dislike" on a wall, and causing some minor property damage. From the story: "A Facebook spokesman said nobody was injured in the incident. He said he could not immediately comment on the possible motive for the act of vandalism. The European head of Facebook is under investigation in Germany over the social network's alleged failure to remove racist hate speech. The investigation was announced last month as German politicians and celebrities voiced concern about the rise of anti-foreigner comments in German on Facebook and other social media as the country struggles to cope with a refugee influx. (The Guardian has a nearly identical story, but a better photo.)

Comments

Well that's good to hear

[Anonymous Coward]

A Facebook spokesman said nobody was injured in the incident.

Any sane person sees where this kind of comment comes from. It's a unilateral attempt to escalate the severity of what actually happened. All they did was break some windows and throw some paint, let's not make this a case of "domestic terrorism" etc.

Freedom of Speech

[Anonymous Coward]

>politicians and celebrities voiced concern about the rise of anti-foreigner comments in German on Facebook
And why can't people voice their concerns over their governments giving away their tax money to middle class "refugees"?

Re:Freedom of Speech

[bentcd]

And why can't people voice their concerns over their governments giving away their tax money to middle class "refugees"?

This is Europe, and Europe doesn't have the sort of unrestricted free speech that the US does. All European "free speech" laws that I've seen (which is far from all of them, I will admit) are along the lines of "speech is free so long as it's not objectionable". And I'm guessing the speech in question has been found objectionable by the people who decide such things.

Now, it's not sufficiently bad here that govt can get away with saying something like "we object to you criticizing us go to jail", but, if it can be rephrased as "hate speech go to jail" or "supporting terrorists go to jail" (or in Germany, "go to jail you nazi") then you're screwed.

Gotta say it

[Tablizer]

Defacebook

Facebook should not remove hate speech.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

There is hate. And there is hate speech. Banning it only drives it underground. Better to allow such haters to speak freely and openly so that we get an idea of how many such people there are. And we can develop ways to talk to them and try to convince the errors in their way. But we will not be able remove all hate and all haters. Some low level of hate has to be tolerated.

Having said that, I wish Facebook would stand for free speech in all spheres. Not just racist speech. If some misguided group decides to offend some religion by depicting their deities in bad light, or even merely depicting their deity itself is considered offensive, Facebook should defend that too, to be consistent.