Ah, sorry about that, I figured that you would use some translator tool on it if you wanted to verify my source.
I ran it through a few different ones but DeepL seemed to handle it best:
Tap for full translation.
Court rules that likes on social media can already be a criminal offense
Social media has been nothing new for a long time, yet courts are still dealing with issues related to it. Or rather: hate speech is and remains a huge issue. Now comes a question: is a simple “like” already punishable?
Yes, at least according to the Meiningen Regional Court. In a recently published decision, the regional court found that even a like can be a punishable offense. Specifically, this is the case if the liked post contains punishable content.
The case in question is the double murder of a police officer in the district of Kusel at the beginning of the year. At the time, a hunter and poacher reacted to a vehicle stop with lethal force. The crime was also a major topic on social media, with an overwhelming majority of people expressing shock at this double murder.
But not exclusively: one Facebook user wrote in a post “Not a single second of silence for these creatures”. At least one user liked this post and for the Meiningen public prosecutor’s office this was already a criminal offense (it is not known whether and how the original author is being investigated, but it can be assumed).
According to the Berlin criminal and media lawyer Ehssan Khazaeli, who was commissioned by the accused, the Facebook user had “made himself liable to prosecution both for denigrating the memory of deceased persons under Section 189 StGB and for rewarding and approving criminal acts under Section 140 StGB”, as the lawyer writes in a blog post (via Tarnkappe).
Is a “like” already “condoning”?
An extensive search was carried out against the person who pressed the “Like” button, and the authorities gained access to the accused’s home, vehicle and cloud storage. Khazaeli criticized the decision: “By liking a post, it remains clear that it is the post of another person - there can be no question of ‘taking ownership’,” said the lawyer.
Khazaeli went on to say that a like is not a “personal mental statement”, and certainly not an endorsement of a crime. “The post is linked to the culture of mourning and the funeral service for the two police officers, not to the murder as such. You can and should find that distasteful, but it is not relevant under criminal law,” says Ehssan Khazaeli.
The lawyer intends to lodge a constitutional complaint against the decision in the coming months: “It’s not about the individual case, but about the fundamental question of whether simply liking something on social media can be a criminal offense.”
I don’t speak German, but it sounds like what happened is that a lawyer pointed out that liking that post could be illegal under new laws, and is trying to get it struck down. So yes ‘could’ is carrying a lot of weight in this case.
And to be clear I’m as left as possible and anti-authoritarian, I just fail to see how being a massive racist and calling for people to be killed (and how to hide your identity, in posts following it) and then forwarding those messages to the police is somehow a Big Brother situation.
Depends on where you live. There’s a very similar case in Germany from 2 years ago compared to what’s going on now.
In Germany a cop was murdered and someone posted on Facebook: “Not a single second of silence for these creatures.”
The courts have ruled that even “liking” a comment/post like that could be a crime.
https://winfuture.de/news,131418.html
Edit: since the post is locked…
Ah, sorry about that, I figured that you would use some translator tool on it if you wanted to verify my source.
I ran it through a few different ones but DeepL seemed to handle it best:
Tap for full translation.
Court rules that likes on social media can already be a criminal offense
Social media has been nothing new for a long time, yet courts are still dealing with issues related to it. Or rather: hate speech is and remains a huge issue. Now comes a question: is a simple “like” already punishable?
Yes, at least according to the Meiningen Regional Court. In a recently published decision, the regional court found that even a like can be a punishable offense. Specifically, this is the case if the liked post contains punishable content.
The case in question is the double murder of a police officer in the district of Kusel at the beginning of the year. At the time, a hunter and poacher reacted to a vehicle stop with lethal force. The crime was also a major topic on social media, with an overwhelming majority of people expressing shock at this double murder.
But not exclusively: one Facebook user wrote in a post “Not a single second of silence for these creatures”. At least one user liked this post and for the Meiningen public prosecutor’s office this was already a criminal offense (it is not known whether and how the original author is being investigated, but it can be assumed).
According to the Berlin criminal and media lawyer Ehssan Khazaeli, who was commissioned by the accused, the Facebook user had “made himself liable to prosecution both for denigrating the memory of deceased persons under Section 189 StGB and for rewarding and approving criminal acts under Section 140 StGB”, as the lawyer writes in a blog post (via Tarnkappe).
Is a “like” already “condoning”? An extensive search was carried out against the person who pressed the “Like” button, and the authorities gained access to the accused’s home, vehicle and cloud storage. Khazaeli criticized the decision: “By liking a post, it remains clear that it is the post of another person - there can be no question of ‘taking ownership’,” said the lawyer.
Khazaeli went on to say that a like is not a “personal mental statement”, and certainly not an endorsement of a crime. “The post is linked to the culture of mourning and the funeral service for the two police officers, not to the murder as such. You can and should find that distasteful, but it is not relevant under criminal law,” says Ehssan Khazaeli.
The lawyer intends to lodge a constitutional complaint against the decision in the coming months: “It’s not about the individual case, but about the fundamental question of whether simply liking something on social media can be a criminal offense.”
I don’t speak German, but it sounds like what happened is that a lawyer pointed out that liking that post could be illegal under new laws, and is trying to get it struck down. So yes ‘could’ is carrying a lot of weight in this case.
And to be clear I’m as left as possible and anti-authoritarian, I just fail to see how being a massive racist and calling for people to be killed (and how to hide your identity, in posts following it) and then forwarding those messages to the police is somehow a Big Brother situation.