Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and other social media companies are now targeted by a new controversial law initiated by Germany. The so called ‘hate speech law’, that is also known as an enforcement on social networks, is now in effect and implies that hate speech content needs to be removed within 24 hours after uploading or posting. If social media companies fail to comply with this law, fines of up to €50 million per post will be applied under the law. Social media companies are also required to publish annual reports on how many content related complaints they have received and what has been done to solve those complaints. Fines up to €5 million can be issued if the companies have not set-up acceptable complaints procedures.
Why do we have this law? The hate speech law was proposed earlier this year but was denied in April. However, Germany itself already had specific hate speech laws which criminalize certain types of hate speech, such as incitement to religious and racial violence, which they try to apply on social media platforms in Germany. In June, the law was passed after a hotly debate, enabling the country to issue these heavy fines. Many other European countries have shown support in this decision. The UK, for example, had been actively leading a push in the G7 nations against online extremism. Furthermore, Justice minister Heiko Maas expressed that it is necessary to combat hate speech because experience has shown that without political pressure, large social media companies and platform operators will not follow their obligations.
On the contrary side, digital rights and free speech activists have expressed concerns about the restrictiveness of the law, arguing that it places too large of a burden on social media companies. Facebook has responded by saying that the law has a lack of scrutiny and consultation and that it does not do justice to the actual problem. Other concerns of journalists and lawyers are that this law might seriously damage the content quality of social media platforms. The law states that social media platforms have 24 hours to delete hate speech and seven days to examine content that are harder to distinguish. Facebook has already expanded their content-control staff to 7500 employees to manually filter out hate speech content. However, this will never be enough. A very likely happening will be that, to avoid fines, social media companies will just delete swathes of comments, even the ones that are not harmful. The law will affect the people’s right to free speech and free opinion. Creating an algorithm for this filtering process will also be difficult since hate speech can be multi-interpretable. Many activists have expressed that the borders of free speech should never even be allowed to be drawn by profit-driven businesses and that it is dangerous to delegate the duties of judging to a commercial platform.
It is important to know that in the last 13 years since the establishment of Facebook in 2004, more information and data has been collected by humans on Facebook than in the millions of years before altogether. Social media platforms and information sharing on this large scale have never existed before. It is not a surprise that new laws and rules will be created because countries are absolutely frightened to lose control over a technological development that grows faster than any other development.
We can choose to embrace the possibilities and to accept the consequences and risks of free generated content. Or we can try to regulate as much as possible. What is too much and what is the balance? We should ask ourselves: How many elections would have stayed the same without social media? How many court laws have been influenced by ‘trial by media’ and how many people actually get affected by hate speech from a social media platform? What do you think?
Sources:
https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/02/germanys-social-media-hate-speech-law-is-now-in-effect/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/business/germany-facebook-google-twitter.html
Hi Jade, interesting post. I personally believe that there has to be some kind of regulation in order to prevent the spread of hate speech via social media platforms. However, the current hate speech law will just lead to the mentioned deletion of a lot of content by social media platforms to make sure to not pay any fine. For me this law seems not properly thought through by the politicians in charge. It also remains open how to deal with companies that have no brick-and-mortar offices in Germany – as it is only a German law for now.