User: Livinginthedatabase

Germany has a long history of data privacy concern

On: Some of the Biggest Economies Aren't a Big User Of Social Media (axios.com)

I've been working with social media across Europe for the best part of the last 10 years (being German myself and working in London), and during that time, social media have generally been handled with a huge amount of skepticism in Germany. Private data protection and consumer protection are very important topics in German politics, and whenever Facebook overextends its reach, you can be sure to read about it in all the newspapers. Data privacy watchdogs have reprimanded Facebook on several occasions. Germany was, as far as I am aware, the first country to force Facebook to filter both fake news and hate speech. All of that is constantly making the news, and Facebook is pretty much "the" social network. Twitter has an entirely different problem - the German language tend to be far more complicated than English. What fits into 140 characters in English can easily reach 200 characters in German, and even then be very imprecise. Most Germans tend to use it as a glorified news feed, less as something interactive.