Germany Fines Facebook ₦815 Million For Violating Hate Speech Law

Germany has fined U.S. tech giant Facebook for violating the country’s law to combat hate speech online, officials said Tuesday.

The Federal Office for Justice (BfJ), a subdivision of the German justice ministry, announced that it had issued Facebook a fine of €2 million for failing to meet the requirements of Berlin’s Network Enforcement Act, a law against illegal content, in its transparency report for the first half of 2018

“In the penalty charge notice, the BfJ reprimands in particular that in the released report, the number of received complaints about unlawful content is incomplete,” the office said in its announcement, adding that this “is creating a distorted image in the public about the extent of unlawful content [on the platform] and the way the social network is dealing with it.”

“Digital platforms have a clear responsibility for the content that is posted on their sites,” Germany’s new Justice Minister Christine Lambrecht said in a written statement released shortly after the fine was announced.

“What has to be clear is that Facebook’s so-called ‘community standards’ are not above German law.”
The fine is a small amount compared with Facebook’s first-quarter revenues of more than $15 billion.