The new Facebook, Google, Twitter hate speech agreement reached today is the conclusion of the German government’s efforts of the past months to eliminate hate speech from social media platforms in the country.
In accord with the agreement, these three companies will delete any hate speech present in discussions under their control within 24 hours.
Which, as you can imagine, raises the much dreaded specter of censorship. Or at least censorship should be a much dreaded specter in a democratic state.
However, the issue is a tad more complicated, as human affairs often are.
Because the German government’s efforts to curb and hopefully eliminate hate speech completely come amid the growing tensions caused by the refugee crisis.
The fact that this government has to deal with more than 1 million refugees received this year alone, for which it is directly responsible, makes it understandable that they have to take practical, effective measures like the hate speech agreement, and not just put out declarations and urge the population to play nice.
Also worth taking into consideration is that hate speech is illegal by German law, meaning hatred promoted against any segments of the population. So asking foreign companies to forbid users on German territory to use it is not that much of a stretch.
Still, the problem of censorship remains. Where does freedom of speech end?
According to Heiko Maas, the German Justice Minister:
When the limits of free speech are trespassed, when it is about criminal expressions, sedition, incitement to carry out criminal offenses that threaten people, such content has to be deleted from the net. And we agree that as a rule this should be possible within 24 hours.
Germany has asked Facebook to help it better manage the refugee crisis by fighting online racism on its platform since September this year and they initially refused.
That prompted the German government to put on more pressure and in the past few months it started investigating four Facebook executives, including Martin Ott, the managing director for all of Central, Northern and Eastern Europe, claiming they had not done enough to control hate speech and are directly responsible for Facebook’s failure in this direction.
Facebook responded at the time by saying that Martin Ott and all of its employees in Germany have done nothing wrong, performed their duties flawlessly and the accusations lack merit.
Now, it seems Facebook, along with Google and Twitter, have finally decided to agree to the German government’s request. Whether because they see eye-to-eye or because they finally caved to the pressure is hard to determine.
But starting today, users of these social media platforms will be able to report hate speech so that it gets deleted within 24 hours. Specialist teams have been set up to deal with such reports.
Whether for good or for ill, this is happening. What are your thoughts?
Image source: 1.
Michael Turner
