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New law has Germany fining hate speech on social media, Entity reports.

Germany’s cabinet just approved a plan to fine social networks up to 50 million euros for failing to quickly remove hate speech.

Women on the internet in Germany are probably breathing a sigh of relief. Twitter would actually have to help stop aggressive trolls? What a day!

“There should be just as little tolerance for criminal rabble rousing on social networks as on the street,” Justice Minister Heiko Maas said. He’s also pushing for similar rules at a European level. And he has no tolerance for that free speech argument, asserting, “Freedom of expression ends where criminal law begins.” 

See, Germany’s a bit spooked by our recent election, which featured a heavy circulation of damaging and misleading fake news. Seeing as they have an election coming up in September, they don’t have time to mess around. And honestly, we can’t blame them.

But does that make it okay for the government to peel away at free speech? The head of the Digital Society Association consumer group believes it turns “social networks into content police.” And that could be an issue when it comes to avoiding those hefty fines.

Look, 50 million euros is a lot of money. It’s not hard to believe that social networks would just start deleting anything remotely controversial in a bid to avoid the penalties.

After all, they only have a week to handle the “less clear-cut cases.” For companies like Facebook, who have 29 million active users in Germany, that can seem like a pretty daunting task.

But to be fair, they apparently haven’t been doing a good job of it thus far. A government survey showed that Facebook had deleted only 39 percent of content deemed “criminal.” Twitter was even worse, having only deleted 1 percent, despite a code of conduct promising otherwise. I mean, are you surprised?

New law has Germany fining hate speech on social media. Maybe that's not such a bad idea after all, Entity reports.

New law has Germany fining hate speech on social media. Maybe that’s not such a bad idea after all… Image via Giphy

Hm. So maybe this new plan isn’t such a bad idea after all.

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