"The fastest German asylum procedure rejects up to 1400 requests per minute," to the photo of a machine gun: Such hate mailings operators of social networks such as Facebook, Twitter or YouTube in future the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) report. Federal Minister of Justice Christine Lambrecht (SPD) and Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (CSU) have agreed on corresponding changes in the Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG). They can count on the support of the interior ministers of the federal states, and on Friday they also voted in favor of a corresponding notification procedure.
According to the draft, providers must report swastika postings, death threats, incendiary content and much more. Deleting alone is no longer enough. The platform operators must also pass on to the BKA the data that makes it possible to identify anonymous hackers: the IP address and port number.
Technical background of this decision: Only together with the port number gives a public IP address (ie, those who can see Facebook or another service) information about the actual terminal. After all, Internet providers often give subscribers in a network, for example in a company, the same public IP address.
Federal Government hopes to focus public prosecutors
Social networks that systematically neglect their reporting obligations should be punished with a fine. Contrary to the idea, the providers should not have to report any insults to the BKA. Here, it should remain that they are only prosecuted if the victims themselves report.
In spite of these restrictions, a flood of reports by Facebook and Co. is expected in Berlin. The Federal Government hopes that the federal states will entrust the prosecutors with the charges against the hackers. "That requires specialized investigators," warns Lower Saxony's Justice Minister Barbara Havliza (CDU). "Getting jobs for new personnel is almost always more complicated than deciding new laws."
Previously, under the Network Enforcement Act, providers only had to remove illegal posts they were referred to and do not pass them on to the authorities. According to their own data, Twitter alone recorded around 470,000 complaints from users in Germany about dubious contributions in the first half of the year. Nearly 45,000 tweets were deleted or blocked.
On YouTube, there were a total of about 300,000 complaints according to the NetzDG, of which one third came from complaint offices such as Jugendschutz.net. The Google subsidiary then deleted nearly a quarter of the reported content.
For Facebook, only a three-digit number of complaints under the NetzDG were received in the same period, for a total of 1050 contents. Of those, Facebook deleted 349.
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