Facebook, Google, Twitter agree to delete hate speech in 24 hours: Germany

[timosman]

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ge...0TY27R20151215

Tue Dec 15, 2015 11:49am EST

Germany said on Tuesday that Facebook, Google and Twitter have agreed to delete hate speech from their websites within 24 hours, a new step in the fight against rising online racism following the refugee crisis.

The government has been trying to get social platforms to crack down on the rise in anti-foreigner comments in German on the web as the country struggles to cope with an influx of more than 1 million refugees this year.

The new agreement makes it easier for users and anti-racism groups to report hate speech to specialist teams at the three companies, German Justice Minister Heiko Maas said.

"When the limits of free speech are trespassed, when it is about criminal expressions, sedition, incitement to carry out criminal offences that threaten people, such content has to be deleted from the net," Maas said. "And we agree that as a rule this should be possible within 24 hours."

Germany last month launched an investigation into the European head of Facebook over its alleged failure to remove racist hate speech.

Martin Ott, Facebook's managing director for northern, central and eastern Europe based in Hamburg, may be held responsible for the social platform's failure to remove hate speech, a spokeswoman for the prosecution said last month.

A Facebook spokesperson said the allegations lack merit and there has been no violation of German law by Facebook or its employees.

Facebook has a partnership with a group called FSM, which monitors multimedia service providers on a voluntary basis, and has said it would encourage its users to push back against racism.

Vandals attacked its offices in the northern city of Hamburg at the weekend, damaging the entrance to the building and spraying "Facebook dislike" on a wall.

[wizardwatson]

Uh, excuse me, what?

[Origanalist]

This sounds like bs. Not much concrete here.

[wizardwatson]

This sounds like bs. Not much concrete here.

Well, it's in Germany. I thought when I first read it, this was US policy.

[UWDude]

This will encourage people to meet face to face, and communicate with fliers and notes. It will strengthen an underground movement, and get the nazi-keyboard-warriors out of their chairs and into the beer halls. Violence will flair, and muslim counterviolence will flair, until Europe is a war zone. Ha ha ha. Control is lost, and Europe will burn.

ISIS is playing the world like a fiddle.

[tod evans]

From Drudge;

It's not just speech but tatoos too....



German neo-Nazi charged over concentration camp tattoo

http://news.yahoo.com/german-neo-naz...162328642.html

German prosecutors laid charges Wednesday against a far-right local politician over a tattoo bearing a notorious Nazi concentration camp slogan and a picture of Auschwitz.

Top German court to consider far-right ban bid in March Associated Press
Marcel Zech, a 27-year-old council member of the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) in a town just north of Berlin, faces up to five years jail for inciting racial hatred, prosecutors told AFP.

Zech's tattoo was photographed in November when he took his shirt off at a public swimming pool in Oranienburg, in the eastern state of Brandenburg which surrounds the capital.

It features the German words "Jedem das Seine" (To Each His Own) -- the message at the front gate of the Buchenwald concentration camp -- and a picture of the former Auschwitz death camp in occupied Poland with barbed wire fences.

Oranienburg is the site of Sachsenhausen, a Nazi concentration camp, where tens of thousands of inmates died.

Zech faces court next Tuesday, said the local newspaper Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's government has labelled his fringe party the NPD, which is most popular in the formerly communist East Germany, "an anti-democratic, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-constitutional party".

The upper house of parliament in 2013 launched a push before the Constitutional Court to ban the NPD.

A similar attempt a decade earlier failed, mainly because the presence of undercover state informants within party ranks was deemed to have sullied the evidence.

The country's highest court is set to hear the relaunched case against the NPD from March 1-3.

The NPD scored just 1.3 percent in 2013 national elections and has never entered the national parliament but is represented in two eastern states' legislatures and some city councils.

[TheTexan]

I guess they're trying to make Germany a safe space.

Its very ambitious of them, but then again, Germany always has been a pioneer in human rights.

[jmdrake]

LOL. See Trump supporters what happens when the government starts taking over the internet?

[Occam's Banana]

So the same people who tell us that mass surveillance of the Internet is needed because it is such a useful tool for finding evidence of "hate crimes," radicalism, terrorism, etc. are also telling us that "hate criminals," radicals, terrorists, etc. need to be deterred from putting that evidence on the Internet in the first place ...