Dhe Federal Office of Justice (BfJ) takes on Twitter. The US short message service does not deal appropriately with user complaints and did not delete obvious insults in good time, the Bonn authority said on Tuesday. For this reason, fine proceedings have been initiated against the subsidiary Twitter International Unlimited. The basis for this is the Network Enforcement Act. This obliges companies to have an effective and transparent procedure for dealing with user complaints about illegal content.
The authority does not assume individual cases, but a structural failure. “The Internet is not a legal vacuum,” tweeted Justice Minister Marco Buschmann (FDP). “Platforms must not simply accept it when their services are misused to distribute criminal content.”
Immediate inspection required
In fact, companies like Twitter have to check reported content immediately to see whether it really is illegal. If so, they must be deleted or access blocked. This duty applies, for example, to hate speech, insults or threats. According to the BfJ, there is a lot of content that was reported to Twitter without action being taken in good time.
The authority can impose fines if there is a systemic problem, i.e. similar cases occur again and again. This is assumed here after reviewing a period of four months. All content was defamatory and repeatedly directed against the same person. From the point of view of the authority, it was an insult.
Twitter now has time to comment, as the authority emphasized. Before a fine can be imposed, the competent district court in Bonn must confirm the content in question as illegal. If this happens, a fine is possible.
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