It’s a bad time for Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook in Germany — He and other Facebook staff are facing charges of abetting crimes like Holocaust denial.
Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg and some other senior staff members at Facebook will be facing abetting crimes charges equivalent to the Holocaust denial charges in Germany.
According to sources, German authorities believe that Facebook’s hasn’t been very honest in its efforts of censoring offensive posts. Thus, a lawsuit was filed against Zuckerberg in which the social media giant has been charged with incitement of hatred.
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The other Facebook officials who have been charged along with Zuckerberg include Facebook’s CEO Sheryl Sandberg, the social network’s chief Europe lobbyist Richard Allan and his Berlin colleague Eva-Maria Kirschsieper.
The news was firstly published on the website “der Spiegel,” and then the entire German media started reporting about the latest scandal involving Facebook. In their report, Spiegel stated that the complaint has been filed by the Würzburg-based attorney Chan-jo Jun.
In the lawsuit, the social network has been accused of ignoring appeals for murder, Holocaust denial and threats of violence. These are only a few of the issues that caused the attention of German authorities.
It is a fact that German hate speech-related laws are quite tight where Nazi symbolism and racist propaganda are completely prohibited. Facebook is obliged to delete all sorts of illegal content from the website but the time consumed during the process is something that has been receiving severe criticism.
Last month, a court in Würzburg in southern Germany sentenced a man to jail for writing hateful comments against Jews and migrants. The punishment came right after German politicians vowed to counter online hate propaganda.
Justice Minister Heiko Maas has termed the efforts by Facebook in deleting offending posts as “too slow” and has pushed the administration in Brussels to form EU-wide laws laying out stricter penalties against the posting of xenophobic or racist materials.
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Previously in September this year a German regulator ordered Facebook to stop collecting data from German WhatsApp users and delete all the data it has received and stored through the messaging application. So Zuckerberg is not new to such situation.
