Facebook has new problems, after those created by the EU which is investigating it and wants to impose a substantial fine, Germany has promulgated a new law against the American company. Called the Facebook law, this is intended to allow the authorities to apply fines of up to 50 euros for the company every time its violations are discovered.
We are talking here about fines of up to 50 million euros applied for each violation made by Facebook regarding the deletion of terrorist propaganda and racist posts. Germany has been "pushing" Facebook for years and years to delete this type of content much faster from its social network, but in the absence of cooperation, it was thought that a special law is the best solution.
The new law voted by the German Parliament will enter into force in October, so from then on Facebook can expect stinging fines due to carelessness. Facebook has a social network with 2 billion monthly active users, and monitoring them all so as not to make terrorist propaganda or publish racist messages is very difficult, but not publishing them will bring the fines.
Facebook – the new German law that threatens the American company with substantial fines
Facebook does not believe that this law will "help" it to delete such messages more quickly, but what could we expect from this American company? According to German law, if Facebook is notified to delete a post with severe racist or terrorist propaganda content, it has up to 24 hours to comply with the order, otherwise it risks a fine of up to 50 million euros.
If that content is not really that severe, Facebook will have a maximum of 7 days to delete that content, so it won't have to respond very quickly. The German authorities will determine how severe the content is and if it must be deleted, so Facebook has no choice but to comply with what is asked of them, or risk substantial fines in Germany for non-compliance with the law.
"We believe the best solutions will be found when government, civil society and industry work together and that this law as it stands now will not improve efforts to tackle this important societal problem. We feel that the lack of scrutiny and consultation do not do justice to the importance of the subject. We will continue to do everything we can to ensure safety for the people on our platform."
Now if you ask why Germany gave such a law, well it comes after Facebook, Google and Twitter agreed with the government to delete posts of this kind. Of course, neither Facebook, nor Google, nor Twitter have respected their commitments made to the German government, so the serious people there thought of forcing the companies to respect them.
Now Facebook, Google, Twitter and any other social network will have to comply with this law, or pay stinging fines to the German government to continue their activity in the country.