Anti-Semitism Commissioner Lawsuit: What the Verdict Means Against Twitter


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Status: 12/14/2022 4:52 p.m

Baden-Württemberg’s anti-Semitism commissioner has won in court against Twitter. Despite its complaint, the company initially did not delete defamatory tweets.

By Christoph Kehlbach, ARD legal department

If you try to contact Michael Blume via direct message on Twitter these days, it may take a while before he responds. In any case, much longer than it used to be. “I’m not on Twitter that often anymore,” he says. The anti-Semitism commissioner of the state of Baden-Württemberg has changed his behavior on social media after he was repeatedly attacked there. “First I ignored the rush.” You get used to hate and hatred in the office. But at some point it got personal,” he says. “When my family got involved, I had to do something.”

He is referring to events in September of this year. In various tweets, Blume was massively personally addressed at the time. For example, it was claimed that Blume, who himself is the contact person for the concerns of Jewish groups in Baden-Württemberg, was “part of an anti-Semitic pack.” It was also said that he had “made an affair” and also “a proximity to pedophilia”.

The goal: clear rules

“It was a deliberate campaign against me,” says Blume today. The Twitter account that circulated these statements has since been suspended for other reasons. And with it the tweets he wrote. Blume wants to take legal action to ensure that the tweets disappear permanently, even if the account is released again. Twitter should also block other tweets from other users that are “essentially the same”, i.e. essentially identical in content.

In the fight against the Internet giant, the religious and political scientist Blume is receiving financial support from the “Hateaid” organization and is being represented by the lawyer Chan-jo Jun. Everyone’s declared goal: to give Twitter clear rules to effectively block defamatory or insulting content.

That can only be done reliably through legal channels, says Blume. His corresponding message was not very successful on Twitter itself. That’s why he went to the regional court in Frankfurt am Main. From there the decision came. And the court largely agrees with Blume.

Blume speaks of a campaign against himself and insisted on the deletion of tweets.

Image: dpa

Twitter should have reacted

The tweets at that time were untruthful or at least illegal in the specific factual context. After Blume reported these comments, Twitter should have responded to them. In concrete terms, this means that the defamatory statements should not have been distributed further from then on.

But the court went even further: the short message service was also not allowed to spread “utterances that were essentially the same”. This affects comments that are to be regarded as equivalent and “have an identical core of the statement despite certain deviations”. The argument that this would oblige Twitter to check all tweets from its users did not hold up. It only has to be checked if a violation of personal rights is specifically objected to. That is reasonable.

The verdict puts Twitter under a lot of responsibility. And that at a time when the short message service is changing. Especially since the takeover of the social network by the multi-billionaire Elon Musk, formerly blocked accounts have been reactivated in series – sometimes without a recognizable pattern or clearly defined requirements for this. In the case of former US President Donald Trump, for example, it was a simple, short-term poll of Twitter users that Musk himself launched that preceded the unblocking.

Lawyer speaks of “milestone”

At a press conference, Blume was very satisfied with the verdict. He hopes that this will send a signal to other people affected: They should gain the courage to take action against defamatory statements, even if that is often difficult. But social networks are public space that should be safe from hate speech and defamation. “These are things I don’t want to get used to. Hate shouldn’t be a business model.”

Blume’s lawyer Chan-jo Jun spoke of a “legal milestone” because the obligation to delete extends to tweets other than those reported – as long as they have the same core content. However, he assumes that Twitter will appeal.

It is the second sensational decision of this Frankfurt press chamber this year: In April, she agreed with the Green politician Renate Künast. She had defended herself against a misquoted meme on Facebook. According to the decision at the time, Facebook had to delete memes with the same core content without further notice.

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