Two delegates of Germany’s far-right party are being investigated by Germany’s state prosecutor over possible incitement to hatred, after one of them accused Cologne police who had tweeted a new year message in Arabic of appeasing “barbaric, gang-raping Muslim hordes of men”.
Beatrix von Storch, the deputy leader of Alternative for Germany (AfD), was also temporarily suspended from Twitter and Facebook as a new law forcing social media companies to remove hate speech came into force in Germany on 1 January.
A tweet from AfD MP Alice Weidel, the party’s joint leader in the Bundestag, was also blocked by Twitter in Germany. In the message, Weidel criticised Von Storch’s ban, saying: “Our authorities submit to imported, marauding, groping, beating, knife-stabbing migrant mobs.”
Cologne police tweeted their new year message in several languages including English, French and Arabic. It wished the people of Cologne and Leverkusen (and everywhere else) a happy new year.
The authorities are considering whether Von Storch and Weidel should be charged with incitement to hatred..
Von Storch’s Twitter account was suspended for 12 hours over her post. Under the new law known as NetzDG, social media firms face fines of up to €50m (£44m) if they do not remove “obviously illegal” hate speech and other postings within 24 hours of receiving a notification.
Critics of the law, which was conceived by the Social Democrat-run justice ministry, say it will place censorship decisions that require legal training at the whim of technology companies.
Questions have been raised about whether sites such as Twitter will hire enough trained moderators to cope with the expected influx of deletion requests.
Digital rights activists, technology companies and political groups including the pro-business Free Democratic party, the Left party and the far-right AfD have been vocal critics of the new law.
Returning to Twitter after her ban, Von Storch – who posed with the former Ukip leader Nigel Farage when he endorsed AfD’s election campaign in September – posted in German: “Facebook has now also censored me. This is the end of the constitutional state.”
theguardian.com