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German Minister: Facebook Should Be Treated Like a Media Company Rather Than a Technology Platform (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Germany's Justice Minister says he believes Facebook should be treated like a media company rather than a technology platform, suggesting he favors moves to make social media groups criminally liable for failing to remove hate speech. Under a program that runs until March, German authorities are monitoring how many racist posts reported by Facebook users are deleted within 24 hours. Justice Minister Heiko Maas has pledged to take legislative measures if the results are still unsatisfactory by then. Maas has said the European Union needs to decide whether platform companies should be treated like radio or television stations, which can be held accountable for the content they publish. Under current EU guidelines Facebook and other social media networks are not liable for any criminal content or hate posts hosted on their platform. Instead, in May Facebook, Google's YouTube and Twitter signed the EU hate speech code, vowing to fight racism and xenophobia by reviewing the majority of hate speech notifications within 24 hours. But the code is voluntary not legally binding. The state justice ministers meeting in Berlin called on the government to take swift action against hate speech on the Internet. The ministers called for more transparency and said social media companies should be obliged to regularly publish figures on how many hate posts have been deleted. They also wanted more public information on how notifications are processed and the criteria behind the decision making. Facebook says it is a technology company, not a media company, that builds the tools to supply users with news and information but does not produce content.
The problem isn't we dislike immigrants and don't want them here.
The problem is the traitor politicians bring them in even though that is the case.
They caused the situation. Admit the mistake, don't redo it and try to undo what has been done.
Well, that's mostly the case.
Hate speech is not about stating that you "hate" a group of people. That's protected by your freedom of expression in Germany. You may also insult or offend people based on race, colour, ethnicity, sexual orientation or whatever. And while there are lawsuits here and there filed in those cases, they're usually dismissed. However what's not protected and classified as hate speech is if your speech includes threads of violence or similar things, that are covered by coercion laws. In German the expression for this is "Volksverhetzung" which loosely translates to 'incitement of the masses'. Another expression is 'Hassprediger' which translates to hatemonger and describes people that incite hatred or violence towards other people or groups. Holocaust denial is the really special case in Germany, that should disappear soon. The more time goes an, the fewer people's experiences get denied and ridiculed by this. The original intention to get rid of the remaining Nazis, was also fulfilled. There's no practical reason to keep this up any more besides of censorship of people who want to publicly declare that they're ignorant of a lot of evidence.
The weird thing is that there are already laws that cover these things. Individuals can be persecuted, although they rarely get convicted. So why trying to make platforms liable? The answer is simple: Next year is election year and politicking, as in doing things for the sake of appearing to care for the people, is a very popular move in politics.