Increasing hate speech cases in Germany is bringing home harsh realities of its post-refugee crisis against the backdrop of German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcoming millions of immigrants, particularly from West Asia.
Though the influx of imimigrants and their embrace by the German Government is being read as a sign of new liberalism, it is creating a kind of love-hate relationship between immigrants and locals in some parts of Germany. It is this situation that right-wing parties and jehadi groups are taking advantage by spreading hatred in society, at times with hate messages and fake news.
To counter fake news and regulate freedom, the German Parliament, Bundestag, cleared a new censorship law called “Net Enforcement law” (NetzDG) last June. It is another story that the law came into force in January 1, 2018. Following which the Government gave three months to the companies to install the new system to take on hate crimes. The law defines 20 subjects as “clearly illegal” such as incitement to hatred or showing the swastika. What has forced the Government to act is that many of social media firms, such as Facebook, and Twitter, and search engine giant Google are taking long time to remove such hate posts. As a result, this invites turmoil at both social and political fronts.
But now, the new law says that social media firms will get 24 hours to remove such news or information. In complex cases, the deadline for removing contents can be extended up to a week.
The companies have also been asked to submit a yearly report on contents they have deleted and reasons for the action. The rule says if the internet agencies do not comply with the law, they would end up paying 50 million Euros or $60 million in penalty. Record says that within the first week of January, the German moderators of Facebook had to handle nearly 1,000 such cases. This shows how fast the German society is turning into hatemongers.
However, to nip this unwanted trends in the bud, people too have been empowered to report hate contents to the German Federal Office of Justice (BfJ) through an online form made available by the office. Despite the move, many legal experts feel that this will not be sufficient to control the far right groups. But Justice Minister Heiko Maas is convinced that the NetzDG will be a vital tool to counter hate crimes. The Minister might be right in some way, but the way out is to make society more tolerant. Else, hate crimes and violence will continue.
History helps all of us recount both the sad and fond memories of the past. Germany’s long memories of Gestapo and the Stasi provide active support for its commitment to an atmosphere of free speech. Its Constitution declares “There shall be no censorship.” It is very ironical that today the same Germany takes extreme measures against hate speech.
A country having a history of Holocaust warrants strong protection for its citizens. Else, the rising tide of right-wing parties will receive a big boost to propagate their policies and programmes. So against this background, many have welcomed the new law by Bundestag.
Today, inciting hatred can invite a prison term for five long years. Meanwhile, Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf is made available only in an annotated form. More importantly what brings relief to millions of refugees is that the NetzDG clearly states that no one can single out any group of people for insult or abuse that could breach the peace in the country.
Interestingly, groups like Pegida purely based on Islamophobia and anti-immigration are receiving full police protection in the country. But the anti-online hate scourge law is not accepted by all. Far right political parties like the Alternative for Democracy (AfD) and the internet activists are protesting against this law. The AfD has branded it as “censorship law”. Its deputy leader Alice Weidel fell victim to the new law as she tried to defend her party MP Beatrix Von Storch on a controversial post on Muslim immigrants. Her tweet defending Storch was deleted in no time by Twitter. The journalist organisations like Reports Without Borders have strongly objected to the new law. A non-profit internet right organisation named Digital Society says this law is hastily conceived and it will create new social problems for the internet companies.
Digitale Gesellschaft political director Volker Tripp warned, “Fighting prosecutable hate speech is a task for the whole of society, tackling it can only succeed on the basis of a thought-through, coherent concept via a joint effort by civil society.”
Unilaterally shifting this responsibility onto companies is legally questionable and on top of that such reasons won’t be productive. These concerns are quite genuine. While imposing a law like the NetzDG, the Merkel Government should have considered its decision once again. Undoubtedly, the Government cannot simply put the ball in the court of the internet giants. Now these agencies need to adjust their entire management and technical operations to the new situation in Germany. This will definitely disturb their millions of followers who are an integral part of the German society. Simply banning open speech will not be able to control the new sets of violence brought by the jehadi groups and some right-wing parties across Europe. With massive immigration of Muslims from the war-torn West Asian countries, the anti-immigrant parties have got a right opportunity for which they have been waiting for long time. Knowing well the traumatic background of the country, Merkel could have been very careful while welcoming millions of refugees from these countries. She is trying hard to make her country march towards strong pluralistic societies like Britain and France, though they had also encountered ups and downs in the past.
It can be righty said Merkel has taken a cautious step, but it involves a lot of risk. That is why even the liberal Free Democrats, the Greens and the socialist left Party had issued public calls for repealing the NetzDG.
There are many who strongly feel that the way out could have been engaging the civil society in tackling hate crimes. The anti-national and anti-social groups are very much part of each society. Unless civil society is ready to handle such elements, no Government alone can counter them. It is not purely a law and order problem as the Merkel Government is assuming. It seems her Government is trying to appease the millions of Muslim immigrants to project Germany as a multi-cultural society.
She knows well that the influx of refugees has fuelled racist propaganda among the nationalist outfits like the AfD and the Pegida. She has tried to stem the flow of refugees to Germany by roping in Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Indeed, this has opened a new window of opportunity for Merkel to prevent from uncontrolled influx by Muslim immigrants.
Her soft corner for the refugees has also created pressure on the rest of the European nations as well as on the Balkan countries. States, such as Germany, have enough resources to adjust many more immigrants. At the same time, most of the European nations, wherein a lot more people are aging very fast, need young workforce for their industrial hubs.
However, the new brand of people who have just landed in Europe will take decades to adjust to the socio-cultural traditions of these advanced nations. The reasons are not far to seek: the refugees have come from entirely a different land and now they will encounter hard new realities such as language, religion and culture barriers in the new geography. It is not as simple as feeding hungry industries with cheap and readymade labour. Moreover, they are all forced to migrate, traumatised mainly by war crimes and definitely, charged by a search for new life of living.
However, Merkel’s long road to save the European project, along with French President Emmanuel Macron, may not help in silencing the nationalist forces inside her country because the racist and xenophobic posts are both natural outburst and political vendetta.
Hence, they need to be handled very carefully as this may lead to political crisis at any time. Today, many critics of the new law say the internet service providers (ISPs) delete the objectionable materials without informing the authorities. This will certainly help the offenders go unpunished as their names and posts are deleted before the Government actually knows about them. This may be true because these ISPs are after all doing their global business.
We are already warned!
Thinkers, such as Thomas Friedman, who have already talked about a “Flat World”, are sending more than enough signals about the dangers of globalism. Globalisation is good, but not good enough. We need much more to counter the challenges posed by globalisation. What causes more pain to all of us is the indispensable nature of internet in our life. We are more of internet citizens today than anything else. This deep dependence on internet is already crippling our daily lives and will do more harm to our future generations. Venture capitalist and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen cautioned all of us in 2011 in his historic essay, Why Software Is Eating The World, published in the Wall Street Journal.
But unfortunately, we did not take him seriously, we simply took it as a metaphor. We all should have started minimising the over-dependence on these ISPs long back. Today, it is too difficult for the younger generations to pull themselves away from the jaws of gargantuan ISPs. The worst came in 2016 when smartphones with lTE mobile infrastructure created the first content delivery platforms that literally transformed the lives of billions of people around the globe.
With very little regulatory mechanism in the cyberspace, companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba and others have started using techniques common in propaganda and casino gambling to attract millions of users to their platforms. And this has become an addiction for many who are glued to the net-life.
Many critics say internet has offered innumerable opportunities to the powerful to inflict harm on the powerless in politics and in society.
Again it’s all about accessibility to these facilities and using them to reap maximum benefits from them. Electioneering and other political campaigns have demonstrated that internet can be used to both undermine and promote democracy across the world. For example the historic Brexit referendum and the US presidential election of 2016 clearly opened to the world how negative news, information and images can be circulated much faster than the positive ones.
With these networks, the so-called breaking news and the manufacturing of consent have gone beyond anyone’s control. And advantages of such facilities are rightly taken by the optimists, jehadis, nationalists and certainly by the commoners. But then, we need to remember that negativity always prevails over positive aspects of anything, unless analysed reasonably. Unfortunately, such analysis is not done by the people on the street. They are always influenced by what they hear and see as it is. Therefore, how a law like NetzDG can help in restoring stability and peace in Germany is highly debatable.
The world’s leading policy makers and thinkers must keep on pondering over this menace the way they are doing right now. Alas! Solution to such an issue could take decades. Till then, how do we offer a safety valve to our current and future generationsIJ
Today it’s Germany and tomorrow it could be any other nation. We must understand that the four tight walls of our age-old nation-states are shrinking faster than ever before. With technology, globalisation has reached new heights. Human beings have fast turned into machines. They are so well connected with information and communication technology that information reaches to them in micro-seconds. And the problem starts here. A country, such as Germany, wherein a more heterogeneous identity is becoming a reality in these days, is not well accepted across. It has been felt that in the past regulating right to express opinions was much easier.
The reason behind is crystal clear: the German society was more conformist, settled and homogeneous to a considerable extent. But after 2015, Germany has been witnessing a more pluralistic type of society. The competing hate speech has posed a formidable challenge. And the call for Merkel is to see that Germany evolves as a purely multi-cultural society like Britain and France.
(The writer is an expert on international affairs)
