At the same time, the government agreed a change to its original proposal, to allow social networks the ability to set up an industry self-regulating body for processing borderline cases, where the legality of the content was unclear, within a week. The law was introduced by the German federal minister Heiko Maas in March and will take effect from 1 October.
The new law details 22 sections of the criminal code social networks will have to help enforce. Among them laws banning libel, character defamation, hate speech, insults against religions, offensive statements and privacy violations.
Facebook,Google and industry associations have warned the German parliament and minister that this could lead to them deleting legal content in order to meet the short deadlines in the law, which could impede freedom of speech. Maas said that overzealous deletion of posts by social networks is not a concern because internet companies have a business interest in allowing as much content as possible.
German ICT federation Bitkom reacted negatively to the new law, claiming that it was passed too quickly, without a diligent check of whether the law complies with the German constitution and EU law. Bitkom director Bernhard Rohleder expects that the law will be dismissed by German courts, as was the data retention law earlier this month. The German federation for internet economy Eco Verband is also against the law, mainly against the short period of time that social networks have to take down illegal content, claiming it could lead to overblocking and tarnishing freedom of expression. The federation also expects that German courts will test the law for its constitutionality.
