Facebook can’t catch a break in Germany with countless criticisms in the government for not doing enough in the fight against hate speech. Now that fight may be getting more personal as Der Spiegel broke the news of a lawsuit targeting Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, and others in the executive leadership for inciting hatred on the social network.
The lawsuit was filed in a Munich court by Chan-jo Jun, a prosecutor who tried a similar suit in Hamburg back in September, but had the complaint shot down. This time around, Jun believes the Munich court will see that Zuckerberg and nine other executives failed to meet their legal obligations and should be charged for breaking German law.
Jun is going into the lawsuit with 438 examples of posts made on Facebook that contained hate speech and calls to violence, yet were not removed after being flagged as inappropriate.
In a statement made to Reuters, a Facebook spokesman stated, “We are not commenting on the status of a possible investigation but we can say that the allegations lack merit and there has been no violation of German law by Facebook or its employees”.
