German Government threatening to sue Facebook and Youtube for up to 50 million dollar over hate speech

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I am kind of embarrassed that this news was broken to me by an American Youtuber. But this shows how under the rugs this law was passed. The resolution was passed as "Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz" which literally translates to law for the enforcement of net working. "Durchsetzung" can also mean to prevail against a strong force instead of "enforcement" though.

Official links

Here is a link to the law written in German http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/18/127/1812727.pdf
And a link to the official post of our parlament in german
https://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/textarchiv/2017/kw20-de-soziale-netzwerke/505074
sadly I was not able to find any English sources from my Government or other official outlets.

The TL;DR: German government can now sue facebook and youtube for hateful posts and hate is as subjectively translated in the text of the law that calling someone an asshole would be enough.

This flies under the argument of enforcing civil dialouge and even though I am in favor of civil debate, I never thought we Germans would file such a preposterous law. Illegal content is defined from actual hate speech (Volksverhetzung) to insults and as far as the beautifully vague word "disruption of public peace" which often means being nude or loud in German law making terms.

Thanks to my subscription to Phillip D Franco I first heard of this law. There is also more in his video than I touch on in this article.

I was always proud that we Germans only censored stuff that was literally Nazi-Propaganda. We do not censor cursing on TV. We only have some American censored music playing because the artists sometimes do not provide an uncensored video version of the track.

I will fight this law at every chance I get. I feel like our government is trying to ride on the German Conscience to put global platforms under censorship. I am sorry World

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