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Pretty fascinating. English translation:
Just Liking Can Be Punishable
08/22/2022 by Lars Sobiraj Reading time: 3 min.
Simply liking other people's posts on Facebook and similar platforms can be punishable under certain conditions, according to the Meiningen Regional Court.
Whether the like is punishable depends on whether the liked post itself contained criminal content. This emerges from a decision by the Meiningen Regional Court (LG Meiningen, Decision of 08/05/2022, 6 Qs 146/22).
Background: A Facebook user from Thuringia had liked another user's post. The case concerns the murder of police officers in the Kusel district on January 31, 2022. The author wrote as a title "Not a single second of silence for these creatures."
The Meiningen public prosecutor's office then obtained a search warrant for the apartment, car, and person who had liked the post. By liking the post, the Facebook user had committed both the defamation of the memory of the deceased under § 189 of the Criminal Code and the rewarding and approval of criminal acts under § 140 of the Criminal Code, according to the application.
The police hoped to find evidence such as smartphones or PCs to analyze the storage media. They were also allowed to search the suspect's cloud storage.
After the raid, the accused hired Berlin criminal and media lawyer Ehssan Khazaeli. Khazaeli filed a complaint against the search warrant. He sharply criticized the decision: "By liking a post, it remains clear that it is someone else's post – there can be no talk of 'making it one's own,'" he stated yesterday. One cannot attach one's own intellectual statement to a mere like.
He also argued that his client had not approved of any crime. While it was tasteless to comment on the murdered police officer's funeral in such a way, Khazaeli does not consider his client's action criminally relevant.
A constitutional complaint is to be filed against both decisions next month. "This isn't about the individual case, but about the fundamental question of whether merely liking on social media can be punishable," said attorney Ehssan Khazaeli. This approach is not an isolated case. We had previously reported about a search warrant issued because of a like on Twitter.
However, the Meiningen District Court's view was supported by the Meiningen Regional Court. The original user's post was considered a defamation of the memory of the deceased under § 189 of the Criminal Code, according to the judgment. The judges view the like as an expression of approval of the author's statements on Facebook. By doing so, the searched person publicly showed that they shared the opinion of the person who defamed the funeral of the killed police officers.
The media would also evaluate particularly public-facing posts based on how many likes they receive. The more attention a posting receives, the greater the likelihood that it will also be covered in the media.
@macniel@feddit.org What's your feeling on this one? You said "Who do you suppose are the people suffering a 6:00am door-knock?" and then got extremely indirect about answering the question, but it sounds like what you were implying is that they deserve it and the law is doing its job. Do you think this person deserves to be charged for this as well?
Do you think this person deserves to be charged for this as well?
I mean, if a "like" on facebook is interpreted as it is "liking someones post and or comment" and that post or comment dehumanized a dead police officer (or the entire force), then yes, I think its more than justified.
You and I have very different opinions of what is the right way to deal with online speech.
I actually agree with poVoq elsewhere in this thread that in terms of moderation, most of this stuff is probably stuff that whoever oversees the channel should be removing. In absolutely no reality should that mean the real-world police need to get involved. There are literally thousands of people on Lemmy who would be getting visits from the American police, concerning a certain Mario brother, if that were the rule here. I would prefer not to open that door (not least of which because it is completely guaranteed that once it starts, it will instantly be applied to anyone who for example calls a politician a penis. You keep sort of swerving around that example as if it "doesn't count" or something, when measuring the impact of this law when applied in practice.)
You and I have very different opinions of what is the right way to deal with online speech.
And that's totally fine, especially since we apparently don't live in the same country and as such different Laws apply to us.
BTW(was posted as an answer as well, sorry,wrong button):
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The mentioned case with a politician being called a dick was found illegal by the courts in the meantime: https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/hamburg-wohnungsdurchsuchung-wegen-pimmelgate-war-unrechtmaessig-a-de489269-6589-453f-896f-56e728128cea
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It is a scientifically proven fact that a dehumanisation and increased verbal violence online reduces the barrier for people to commit actual violence against people.
Mmmh I don't know if that Tim Cushing has any grasp on what was actually going down. The Andy Grote case though is factually right though, he is indeed 1 Pimmel.
The comment on " February 18, 2025 at 11:53 am" is full on the money though.
I’m going to have to step in here….
I was born and raised in Germany, to a US Army officer and a German lady. At 12 years of age, the family was posted to the US, where Dad retired due to medical problems.
So I know how Germans think. And yes, it’s been a long time since I physically visited my home country, but I still have several friends and a bit of family there. (And thanks to Al Gore, I now have an internet to keep up with them.) But here’s the crux of what’s going on, and it slides a bit sideways toward Elmo, as you’ll see. Bear with me, it gets a bit long here.
In short, the so-called ‘Alt-Right’ has been growing for the last three decades, and perhaps a bit longer. Ever since Trump 1.0, Europe, and Germany in particular, has been getting agitated from with by the same assholes as show up here – mean-spirited and highly dysfunctional assholes masquerading as adults, who want nothing more than for society to let them act like reprehensible assholes. (These are the very people that Elmo can manipulate with ease.)
So now let’s dig a bit behind the 2018 law, shall we? Without going to the internet, what would you guess is the average of the average lawmaker in Germany? Time’s up, here’s the answer: A majority of them are direct 1st or 2nd generation descendants of survivors of World War II. They have been inculcated since birth to know that the war took place, that millions of loved ones were killed, and that in the end, it was all pointless.
That’s the reasoning behind such laws, now lets look at the so-called ‘victim’s of the Lower Saxony “goose-steppers”, to paraphrase the intent of both this article and the 60 minutes interview.
Who do you suppose are the people suffering a 6:00am door-knock? Hint: it ain’t the adult children and grandchildren of those survivors I mentioned above. They’re the great-grandkids, and I’d take a bet that more than a few of them were not born in Germany, they’re either 1st or 2nd generation immigrants or refugees from somewhere outside of the EU.
These are the impressionable ones that, upon learning a different language, they undoubtedly also learned some of the local political beliefs from various sources, both formal and informal.
Yes, there are cross-overs in both age groups, lawmakers and lawbreakers alike. But this is the general outlook.
tl;dr:
The last bet you’ll ever want to place is betting that the general populace of Germany wants another Hitler. They remember what the US did to them, and they certainly know what the US is capable of doing now. And while Trump 2.0 will likely not say anything about Germany’s laws being overbearing, you can bet that the world as a whole will keep a focused eye on what’s happening on this front.
Also, techdirt? Where every anonymous commentator is marked as a coward? I don't think its a credible "news" portal.
From the comment you reposted:
They’re the great-grandkids, and I’d take a bet that more than a few of them were not born in Germany, they’re either 1st or 2nd generation immigrants or refugees from somewhere outside of the EU.
This is near certainly false and also pretty hateful itself.
My guess is that most of the people impacted by these raids are very much German by ancestry and usually not that young either. And with the exception of some cases related to some very petty politicians, it usually is extremely hateful stuff that I as a mod here would certainly remove on sight, no questions asked.
- You want to reformat that comment not to be code-formatted, it scrolls horizontally off the screen for me.
- Raiding someone's home and taking their devices because they called a politician a penis is horrifying. I don't know why you want to imply that there's anything wrong or misleading about a story reporting on it or similar raids, or bring in some irrelevancies about World War 2 to make it look different. I'm aware that the German free speech laws are different from America's in ways that are attributable to the war and the realities of trying to rebuild a functioning society after, and I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but as far as I can tell that whole conversation has only the vaguest extrapolatory connection with this conversation.
- Techdirt is great. They are reliable and serious even if they are casual in presentation sometimes. "Anonymous coward" is an homage to Slashdot which invented the term and was in some ways the grandaddy of all comment sections and link aggregators that came after it.
Raiding someone’s home and taking their devices because they called a politician a penis is horrifying.
I explicitly said that THIS one was not ok (Andy Grote is 1 pimmel) and that I agree that its an horrifying misuse of power.
Okay I failed to see the analog to Slashdot, as I've never used it.
Okay. What are the others? The other example they listed was posting a racist cartoon, they didn't go into any other details. You said they have no grasp, is there something I should read instead to get up to speed?
I'm comfortable saying that if you're prosecuting 3,500 cases of online "hate speech" per year, and some examples among them include stuff that is horrifying if prosecuted, then the situation is bad. Right? Or, it sounds like you're disagreeing with that, and saying that one was a penis but the other 3,499 were okay? Tell me.
The referenced video has other examples, like calling for the rape and murder of specific people, including one example where the person (a local politician) was actually murdered by a right-wing terrorist shortly after.
Right, the CBS transcript has a lot more information and balance about it.
I would still like to see a breakdown of how many of these were for what. Surely calling for someone's rape or murder was already illegal, Nazi symbolism within Germany was already illegal, you could sue if someone was publishing false quotes by you, and so on. A lot of the examples they bring up seem sort of misleading, because they're linking them with the controversial 2018 law, and sort of tangling up the issues of "we got a lot more aggressive with policing already-illegal online speech that probably should stay illegal" versus "we made all kinds of things that are what Lemmy moderators deal with every day, into police matters now." It feels like it is from the cops' point of view instead of the defendants', leaving some pretty glaring unexplored questions, which was Techdirt's point.
Like I say I would like to see the breakdown. I won't say it is not 3,499 AfD trolls and 1 penis joke, but it does seem unlikely. Probably it's not the inverse of that either, though, that's a fair point.
I can't say what those 3500 cases were. But when it comes to anti-semitism and racism, judges are more than happy to file search warrents for the police to act upon.
The other example they listed was posting a racist cartoon
which probably was enough for StGB 130 to apply.
then the situation is bad. Right?
oh, yeah it is bad. Twitter, Facebook and other social media are huge cesspools which spawn those cases; its "free speech" after all right? Even though its not without consequences.
is there something I should read instead to get up to speed?
i cannot give you anything. Sorry :/
BTW:
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The mentioned case with a politician being called a dick was found illegal by the courts in the meantime: https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/hamburg-wohnungsdurchsuchung-wegen-pimmelgate-war-unrechtmaessig-a-de489269-6589-453f-896f-56e728128cea
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It is a scientifically proven fact that a dehumanisation and increased verbal violence online reduces the barrier for people to commit actual violence against people.
I think you want to render the text as a quote using >, not as code using ```. It looks a bit weird with syntax highlighting...