Germany: New Law Makes Social Media Basically Illegal

Adrian Sol
Daily Stormer
October 3, 2017

Everything must be shut down – for the good of Germany, of course.

It used to be that things were rosy in Merkel-land. The police would kick down the doors of people who made insensitive comments on facebook in the middle of the night, and comedians would be arrested for making fun of foreign heads of states.

But then, the level of goyim knowing started hitting unmanageable levels, and all the naughty Germans couldn’t be arrested fast enough.

So a new plan was drafted: shut everything down.

Engadget :

Germany’s law combating hate speech on social media is now live. It’s the country’s attempt to get social networks to remove offensive posts within 24 hours (or seven days, if the content is difficult to evaluate). Those that fail to comply may be fined up to 50 million euros ($58 million) by the country’s Ministry of Justice, though they’ll get a grace period until January 1st, 2018, to prepare.

This is obviously impossible to do, unless every post is reviewed manually. That would make real-time communication impossible, of course.

Germany proposed the legislation back in April, which was later named the Network Enforcement Act (Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz in German, abbreviated as NetzDG). Facebook fired back, claiming the bill would simply encourage sites to simply take down content to avoid the fines. Further, “It would have the effect of transferring responsibility for complex legal decisions from public authorities to private companies,” a Facebook spokesperson told Engadget at the time. Regardless, the bill passed a month later.

It should be noted that Germany seriously cracks down on hate speech, and police raided 36 homes earlier this year while investigating users who had posted such. Those who are charged with inciting racial hatred can be imprison for up to five years, according to a New York Times report.

Few things warrant a SWAT raid. But Saying mean things on Facebook is definitely one of them.

The NetzDG law applies to any site that meets the legal definition of social network regardless of size, according to Spiegel Online. Germany isn’t alone in threatening internet titans with serious penalties if they don’t swiftly take down hate speech: The EU just approved a law enabling it to threaten legal action against social media companies that don’t take down such content.

It’s inconceivable that the German government actually believe any company has the capacity to monitor millions of posts in real time and determine whether they violate various countries’ laws.

The real objective isn’t so much to get these media platform to censor themselves, as they already do that on their own. What they really want is for these platforms to be unable to function in Germany, at least in their normal, free way. In effect, the German government is outlawing social media.

No company could afford the manpower needed to filter all these posts and delete them within 24 hours. Moreover, any algorithm or machine learning system could easily be bypassed by clever use of language. If the company has to pay multiple 58 million dollar fines every time shitposters figure out how to bypass their censorship systems, they’ll go bankrupt in no time.

It’s hard to say what will happen, but I would bet that most social media platforms will either block access to German IP’s or offer Germans a drastically curtailed experience that makes discussion impossible.

I doubt it’s a coincidence that this law is passed just after Merkel gets reelected. I doubt shutting down all social media would have been a very popular policy position to take before the election. But now that the government’s power is secure, they can proceed with the most ridiculous social control program we’ve seen in a Western nation in a long time.

Make no mistake, this is absolutely no different from holding phone companies responsible for what people say in calls, or holding electricity companies responsible if people use power to grow illegal drugs.

It’s insane.

But this is the new reality.