By Zeke Turner
This article is being republished as part of our daily
reproduction of WSJ.com articles that also appeared in the U.S.
print edition of The Wall Street Journal (January 11, 2018).
BERLIN -- Germany has gone live with one of the most onerous
laws aimed at forcing Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc. and YouTube to
police content on their platforms.
The verdict after 10 days in effect? It's complicated.
Since Jan. 1, technology companies face fines of up to EUR50
million ($60 million) if they fail to delete illegal content on
their platforms, ranging from slander and libel to neo-Nazi
propaganda and calls to violence. The law applies to most
social-media networks in Germany.
The banned content was always illegal. What's new is that social
networks with more than two million users in Germany now are
responsible for cleaning it up themselves.
The new law pushes U.S.-based social-media platforms in Germany
one step closer to the level of responsibility that newspapers and
media here have long faced -- a level far higher than what the
platforms have faced domestically. Under U.S. law, tech platforms
aren't liable for user content shared on their services.
Many of the Silicon Valley giants affected by the new rules have
already pushed back publicly in Germany. The law has also raised
alarm among free-speech watchdogs and legal experts.
"In a democracy, it has to be a state organization that enforces
the law, " said Dieter Frey, a lawyer and media expert in
Cologne.
Social-media companies typically rely on software and a mix of
in-house and third-party content moderators, who sift through posts
users have flagged as problematic and delete those that violate
local law. In certain cases, the companies' legal teams jump in.
The law often has companies working under time pressure to
determine whether a post breaches one of 24 paragraphs of the
criminal code.
Ahead of the new law, Facebook contracted with providers for
1,200 moderators in Germany, a number that compares with 7,500
moderators world-wide. Just 1.5% of Facebook's 2.07 billion monthly
users world-wide are based in Germany.
Facing increased pressure after the U.S. election and terror
attacks around the globe, tech companies have taken some voluntary
steps to monitor the massive amount of content on their platforms.
Facebook, for instance, is figuring out how to fully monitor and
analyze the more than one million user reports of potentially
objectionable content that it says it receives every day.
At YouTube, a unit of Alphabet Inc.'s Google where users watch
more than a billion hours of video a day, the company has used both
software and humans to screen for content that warrants removal,
such as extremist videos. In the U.S., Google has said it instructs
human reviewers to mark violent or hateful content as low quality,
which will likely move such sites lower in Google search results.
Twitter has been using internal technology to flag accounts that
promote terrorism.
Following rules can pose practical difficulties, as companies
have found in the first 10 days Germany's new law has been in
effect.
This month, Twitter temporarily suspended the account of a
German satire magazine, Titanic, demanding that the magazine delete
a parody tweet mocking a German nationalist lawmaker, Beatrix von
Storch.
Tim Wolff, Titanic's editor-in-chief, said Twitter notified him
of the suspension by email on Tuesday, Jan. 2, and asked him to
delete the tweet. Later, other users piled on and flagged four
other tweets on Titanic's account, including one that made fun of
German police and another about Austria's Chancellor Sebastian
Kurz, whom Titanic has called "Baby Hitler" and said should be
killed.
Twitter asked Mr. Wolff to delete those four tweets as well.
Then, after an internal review that included input from legal
professionals on its support team in Germany, Twitter dropped that
request and reversed Titanic's suspension. The tweet about Ms. von
Storch remains offline.
Mr. Wolff said, "Our suggestion is to let us at Titanic decide
what is satire and what isn't."
In another case, on December 22, before the law had taken full
effect, Facebook blocked the account of Mike Samuel Delberg, a
28-year-old political representative of Berlin's Jewish community,
after he posted a video of an Israeli restaurant owner in Berlin
being threatened on the street.
In a false positive, Facebook content monitors thought the video
violated the company's community standards. "It went viral," Mr.
Delberg said. Then "all of a sudden Facebook deleted the video and
blocked me and said that I broke their guidelines." The company has
since apologized to Mr. Delberg for deleting the video and he is
back online.
"It can't be true that...while raising awareness in public of
anti-Semitism, an account gets deleted," Mr. Delberg said.
"We should not be the ones who judge if a post is illegal or
not," said Semjon Rens, Facebook's public-policy manager in
Germany. "This is the responsibility of courts," he said, adding
Facebook is "working hard to put the right processes in place and
to comply."
A spokesman for Google's YouTube said it would "continue to
invest heavily in teams and technology" to be able to remove
"content that breaks our rules or German law" more quickly.
A representative for Twitter declined to comment on the record
or to disclose the size of the team it employs to review content on
its site but did explain the company's views.
German enforcement officials are still finding their way. Ulf
Willuhn, a senior public prosecutor in Cologne, spent the beginning
of the year considering whether his office would have to pursue
legal action based on a tweet from an anti-immigrant lawmaker --
the real Ms. von Storch, not a parody this time -- who had referred
to the local Arabic-speaking community as "group rapists."
After some research, Mr. Willuhn decided his office wasn't
responsible. Separately, Twitter had already asked her to delete
her tweet.
"At the end of the day, ...it's not as easy as it seems at first
glance, " Mr. Willuhn said. "Yeah, it's very very difficult."
Write to Zeke Turner at Zeke.Turner@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 11, 2018 02:48 ET (07:48 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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