Facebook, Google and Twitter Agrees to remove hate speech in Germany

Recent attacks on Syria have caused a huge influx of refugees in Germany. The number crossed 1 million, which also raised hateful comments in German on social media.

According to Time, on Tuesday, officials announced that Facebook, Google and Twitter have approved the request to erase all the racist comments on their platforms. The action will be taken within 24 hours in Germany.

As the country faces the struggle to accommodate more and more of the refugees, an increasing number of people are posting hateful speech against the move. This has stirred the government as it is trying to remove the comments on social media.

German Justice Minister Heiko Maas said, "When the limits of free speech are trespassed, when it is about criminal expressions, sedition, incitement to carry out criminal offences that threaten people, such content has to be deleted from the net,".

Maas reports that all the three social media will use "specialist teams", that will help access the hate speech reports. The inappropriate content will be instantly deleted in accordance with German law.

Last month, Germany slammed the European head of Facebook and carried out an investigation against him as he was alleged of failing to remove the racist hate speech from the platform, as reported by Reuters. A spokeswoman for the prosecution announced previous month that Facebook's managing director for northern, central and eastern Europe based in Hamburg, Martin Ott may be held guilty of not erasing the racist comments.

However, a Facebook spokesperson labeled the allegations wrong as according to him, neither Facebook or its employees had violated German law. Facebook had signed a partnership with a monitoring group FSM.

It keeps check and balance on multimedia service providers. It has also claimed to persuade the users to remove the racist comments and refrain from posting any.

Maas's statement of creation of a joint "taskforce" to act against racist speech faced must of the criticism when it failed to achieve its goal, as mentioned by RT.

"Maas has buckled in the face of Facebook and Co.," Green party leader in the Bundestag (German parliament) Katrin Göring-Eckhardt told Spiegel Online. "[He] called far-right crimes shameful, but it's almost exactly as shameful that his ministry is doing nothing against online hate."

The request of the justice minister to put together the German-speaking team at Facebook is not being wholly considered. Maas also demanded that Facebook will not report the total number of messages removed in contrast to the number of messages marked as abusive.

Instead, according to the terms of the agreement with Maas, the requirement of the three social network sites will be to ensure "transparency by reporting to the public how it implements its terms of use with relation to removing reported content,"

Due to Germany's Nazi past, the country has enforced strict rules against the racist hate speech.