Twitter is currently facing a legal challenge in Germany over how the platform handles antisemtic hate speech.
The lawsuit filed by hateaid, a digital rights organization and the European Union of Jewish students, argues that Twitter has failed to enforce its own rules against antisemitic content including holocaust denial.
The organization claims that appalling Tweets on Twitter was not taken down where a user was hell-bent on refusing to remove a comment related to holocaust denial, which is criminalized in Germany and has an imprisonment period of up to five years.
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Part of the lawsuit reads,
“Although Twitter prohibits antisemiic hostilities in it’s rules and policies, the platform leaves a lot of such content online. Even if the platform is alerted about it by users. The current studies prove that 84% of posts containing antisemitic hate speech were not reviewed by social media platforms, as shown in a study by the center for countering digital hate, and Twitter acted on just 11% of antisemitic posts reported, the second lowest rate across major platforms.
“Which means that Twitter knows Jews are being publicly attacked on the platform every day and that antisemitism is becoming a normality in our society, and that the platform’s response is by no means adequate”.
While speaking in an interview, the president of the European Union of Jewish students Avital Grinberg described Twitter’s holocuast posts as disgusting.
In her words, “The tweets are truly disgusting, very scary and saddening to read. We are not just talking about discriminatory speech, we are talking about hate speech that is illegal in German law”.
Meanwhile, Twitter CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly made claims that Twitter will respect all laws in the countries where it operates (including European speech laws). Although he is yet to make any public comment on the lawsuit filed against his company.
In 2021, Twitter partnered with the Campaign against Antisemitism, before Musk took over the company. The campaign claimed that Twitter’s policies were failing and the social media platform was able to remove only 400 of 1,000 tweets containing hateful content attacking Jews.
Meanwhile, since Musk took over as the company’s CEO, multiple accounts which were removed due to hate speech have been reinstated. Recall that Musk had offered ‘amnesty’ for previously banned accounts that hadn’t broken the law such as that of U.S rapper Kanye West, who was resuspended from the platform after tweeting an image of a swastika inside a Star of David.
Reports disclose that Antisemitic posts referring to Jews or Judaism soared more than 61 percent in the two weeks after Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.