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While Facebook has began its campaign to remove fake news, a court in Austria has ruled that the company should also remove hate speech found on its platform.
BBC reports that Austria’s Green Party brought the case to court after its leader, Eva Glawischnig, became a target of hateful comments through a fake account. The court said that Facebook could delete such comments automatically, and that the company would need to do more than block messages only in Austria.
Facebook has yet to comment on the ruling, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg has cited previously that the network is not a media company, possibly to avoid being legally responsible for the site’s content.
However, with the proliferation of fake news and hate speech, governments have begun to pressure social media sites to monitor content.
Facebook has promised to hire 3,000 people to control content such as child abuse, self-harm and hate speech. It has also started its crackdown on fake news, deleting tens of thousands of accounts in the United Kingdom and pushing for an awareness campaign to identify fake news.
Google stated last April that the company was changing its search engine algorithms to ensure fake news does not rise in top search results.
Social media companies should expect more regulation on their platforms. Last April, Germany proposed a law to impose fines of up to €50 million ($53.3 million) on social media companies if they are unable to remove fake news and hate speech in a span of 24 hours to 7 days.
Germany’s justice minister Heiko Maas mentioned that only 1 percent of hate speech is removed from Twitter, while less than 50 percent is removed from Facebook. On the other hand, YouTube is able to remove 99 percent of hate content.
Bitkom, a German tech lobby group, aired concerns that such measures would give rise to censorship and could have an impact on free speech. Niña V. Guno/JB
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