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Twitter faces fines for not acting on German censorship demands

Germany doesn't support free speech.

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Twitter is facing fines in Germany for not censoring content deemed illegal under the countryโ€™s strict โ€œhate speechโ€ laws.

The federal government announced that it was investigating Twitterโ€™s failures to act on censorship requests.

According to Chan-jo Jun, founder of specialist IT law firm JunIT Rechtsanwรคlte, the federal government is only acting on a few, out of the hundreds, of cases that have been reported.

Jun will be representing the Antisemitism Commissioner of the state Baden-Wรผrttemberg, Michael Blume.

Towards the end of last year, Junโ€™s firm filed a lawsuit against Twitter for refusing to remove hate speech content.

The court said that the tweets were โ€œillegal.โ€ On Tuesday the federal government said that there were โ€œsufficient indications of failuresโ€ by Twitter.

Jun initially reported several tweets to the Federal Justice Office (BfJ). However, they were told that there was not enough material to prove systemic failure.

โ€œWe had reported a number of cases to the [BfJ] at that time, and found that they agreed that these tweets were illegal but said they do not have enough material for a systematic failure. And thatโ€™s when a group of volunteers started to systematically search for illegal content and keep reporting that and making a huge databaseโ€ฆ and they kept submitting that to the [BfJ]. So itโ€™s over 600 cases,โ€ he said.

โ€œThe ones that are now subject to the [federal governmentโ€™s] case appear to be just the first ones. They picked them out because they were all similar in that way โ€” I think they came from the same user and had the same content. Thatโ€™s probably why they chose those because it would be the easiest case to see that is systematical failure. That it was not a single failure of one content moderator but actually that the vast majority โ€” or all โ€” of reports were wrongly handled.โ€

NetzDG carries a fine of up to โ‚ฌ50 million per case, but Jun said it was unlikely that Twitter would be fined the maximum.

โ€œThe law expects fines of up to โ‚ฌ50 million for each case. It is possible that at first they will not take the full amount. Thereโ€™s actually a tableโ€ฆ that states the intensity of the failure. So I would expect something between โ‚ฌ5M and โ‚ฌ20M to be the first fine,โ€ he suggested, in an interview with TechCrunch.

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