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Munich Court To Try Facebook's Zuckerberg For Inciting Hatred (dw.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Deutsche Welle: A Munich court has opened a lawsuit against Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, German media reported on Friday. News outlet "der Spiegel" wrote on its website, before the main weekly magazine's Saturday release, that it had obtained court documents charging the social media mogul with incitement to hatred. Zuckerberg is reportedly being charged alongside Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg, chief Europe lobbyist Richard Allan, and his Berlin counterpart Eva-Maria Kirschsieper. According to Spiegel, the complaint comes from the Wurzburg-based attorney Chan-jo Jun. In the suit, he accuses Facebook of tolerating appeals for murder, threats of violence, and Holocaust denial, among other things. Laws regulating hate speech in Germany are extremely tight, with most Nazi symbolism and racist propaganda strictly forbidden, a legacy of Germany's role in World War II. Although Facebook is obliged to remove illegal content from its site, it has repeatedly garnered hefty criticism for the time it takes to do so.

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  1. Re:Why we never should handed over control of DNS by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Informative

    Freedom of speech is a necessary pre-requisite for freedom, so it's worth mentioning:

    The reason Germany has such strict anti-speech laws is actually a tool of oppression from the allies. They didn't want to have another uprising like Hitler leading into World War 3 (also part of the reason the US has military bases in Germany), so they took measures to ensure Hitler's specific type of propaganda would be oppressed.

    So Germany is not an example to the world here, but neither were the laws intended to be.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."