A lot of new is focused on illegal posts and false news at the moment, and Germany has had enough of it. They have taken a stand against illegal posts as the justice minister talks about imposing fines on those tech companies that fail to delete any illegal posts by the early part of next year. The new laws would ensure that companies take a more supervisory role in the monitoring of text and policing of hate speech on their sites. Other actions that would be required of companies would include setting up clear complaints procedures and to publish the number of complaints they receive. Companies would also be required to employ legally qualified ombudsmen to carry out the task of deleting the illegal posts.
Any online companies that failed to remove illegal hate speech posts within 24 hours would be fine considerably. This may be in the form of an on-the-spot fine up to 500,000EUR or a fine that’s calculated based on their annual turnover. It comes as no real surprise really that Germany has decided to impose these new laws as they are known for having some of the toughest laws in the world when it comes to hate speech. In Germany, you can get a prison sentence for denying the Holocaust and displaying hatred against minorities, so it just goes to show that they take this sort of thing very seriously.
But, is the law falling upon deaf ears? Facebook, Google, and Twitter vowed to delete illegal posts within 24 hours, back in the autumn of 2015. As of one year later, statistics showed that Facebook had just deleted 46%, YouTube only 10%, and Twitter a miserable 1%. The German government has stressed that if this is not improved significantly by early next year, then sanctions will be looked into further and could be issued as a result. Currently, the main companies on the radar are Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, but the change in law would also affect the likes of Google too. Having a complaints channel is not something that Google has had to concern itself with in the past and simply has a “send feedback” window at the bottom of its search page. But now, under the new laws, they too will need to heighten their monitoring duties to ensure those inciting hatred law are dealt with accordingly.
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