Policing online hate speech is no easy task. Germany is about to find out how difficult it can be.
The country’s new rules aimed at the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter took effect Sunday, including potential fines of up to €50 million if these social media giants consistently fail to remove illegal content from their digital platforms within 24 hours.
The law — known locally as NetzDG — has caused deep divisions within Germany between advocates that want West Coast U.S. tech companies to take more responsibility over what is published online and free speech campaigners who argue the legislation goes too far in policing the digital world.
It also has raised hackles within the European Commission and with American policymakers about Germany’s crackdown on hate speech. The country’s proposed fines represent the largest financial penalties for such activities anywhere in the Western world.
“Almost all the great tech companies originated in Silicon Valley and in the United States, not in Europe,” said Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, whose district includes Silicon Valley. He added that while tech companies needed to remove offensive content, the government should not censor online speech.
“There is value in a dialogue within the U.S. about what more can be done to tackle hate speech,” he said. “But Europe is not a model for innovation.”
German policymakers rushed through the new rules over the summer, building on wide public anger that tech companies were not doing enough to remove hate speech. That included online material about recently arrived refugees who protested it constituted “fake news.”
Europe’s largest economy already has stronger hate speech restrictions than most other Western countries. The new law is designed, in part, to ensure that those rules are enforced equally online as they are offline.
Facebook and Twitter, for example, failed to meet a national target to delete at least 70 percent of online hate speech within 24 hours of being notified by users, according to a government-sponsored report published earlier this year. Google met the requirements for removing content over the same time period.
“For companies to take on their responsibility in [the] question of deleting criminal content, we need legal regulations,” said Heiko Maas, the country’s federal justice minister when he announced the new rules in May.
A vocal minority of German politicians balk at the changes. They claim that the new law was passed too quickly for proper legislative review and that companies are unlikely to fully comply with the new onerous rules. Many are calling for an immediate review, though experts say that it’s unlikely that will happen amid ongoing discussions about a new coalition government in Germany.
“This law is a big mess,” said Renate Künast, a German Green MP. “All we have is a defective law and enormous legal uncertainty.”
How it will work
As part of the regulatory overhaul, Germany’s new hate speech rules require social media companies to hire representatives in German who must inform local authorities about the companies’ efforts to remove potential online hate speech.
In the most egregious of cases, companies must delete the material within 24 hours, but they will have up to seven days to comply if there is doubt whether the content should be removed.
Fines totaling up to €50 million will only be levied on companies that do not show an active willingness to meet the German target for removal of such material within a day. And digital platforms must provide German users an easily accessible online system to make such complaints. Those changes are expected to be made public by early 2018.
“It is likely that at least larger platforms will spend considerable legal resources to defend against any broader interpretation of the law,” said Julia Reda, a German Green MEP.
Company executives said they were hiring hundreds of new monitors to police online content in Germany, and that they were working on changes to how their platforms operated so that people could quickly notify them of potentially illegal content.
Others, however, questioned the feasibility of Germany’s push to clamp down on hate speech, saying that it could prove easier to remove more digital material than was required under the law to avoid the hefty fines. Such steps, industry executives warned, would potentially hinder people’s online freedom of speech.
Earlier this year, Facebook suggested that Germany’s hate speech legislation amounted to a transfer of the responsibility to determine what speech is legal from domestic courts to private companies.
“We share the goal of the German government to fight hate speech and have made substantial progress in removing illegal content,” Anne Laumen, a Facebook spokeswoman, said in a statement last week.
Spokesmen for Google and Twitter declined to comment about the start of Germany’s new hate speech rules.
The companies also have responded to growing concerns in the United States, notably around potential jihadist propaganda that is shared on their digital platforms. These efforts come as American lawmakers and regulators are questioning the role these tech giants have in sharing content online, including fake news around last year’s U.S. presidential election.
Commission officials also have been less than welcoming — a sign that Brussels is trying to balance Germany’s aggressive push to clamp down on hate speech with other member countries’ more voluntary approach to tackling the issue.
In a recent visit to Washington, European Commissioner for Justice Věra Jourová stressed she wanted to avoid “fragmentation” in Europe’s stance toward digital companies, but added that Brussels would support new hate speech sanctions “if we do not see improvement.”
In response, the Commission released its own guidelines last week that pushed tech giants to do more to flag and remove illegal content from their sites. Such plans, though, remain voluntary.
Officials said, however, that they could introduce stricter hate speech proposals by May 2018 if digital companies did not improve their behavior. These potential changes, experts said, could mirror Germany’s tougher line, but it would be difficult to reach consensus at an EU-wide level.
Still, Mariya Gabriel, Europe’s new digital commissioner, said that in one in four cases, it took digital platforms more than a week to remove illegal content, and companies must do more to police what people are posting on their networks.
The current situation, she said, “is not sustainable.”
(Source: Politico)