Twitter is facing fines in Germany for not censoring content deemed illegal under the countryโs strict โhate speechโ laws.
The federal government announced that it was investigating Twitterโs 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, Junโs firm filed a lawsuit against Twitter for refusing to remove hate speech content.
The court said that the tweets were โillegal.โ On Tuesday the federal government said that there were โsufficient 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.
โWe 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 thatโs when a group of volunteers started to systematically search for illegal content and keep reporting that and making a huge databaseโฆ and they kept submitting that to the [BfJ]. So itโs over 600 cases,โ he said.
โThe ones that are now subject to the [federal governmentโs] 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. Thatโs 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 โฌ50 million per case, but Jun said it was unlikely that Twitter would be fined the maximum.
โThe law expects fines of up to โฌ50 million for each case. It is possible that at first they will not take the full amount. Thereโs actually a tableโฆ that states the intensity of the failure. So I would expect something between โฌ5M and โฌ20M to be the first fine,โ he suggested, in an interview with TechCrunch.