A German court has ruled that the European Union of Jewish Students and far-left organization HateAid can sue Twitter for not removing six “racist and violent tweets.”
The groups petitioned the court in January over “insufficient moderation of content” which they say violates German hate speech laws.
“Twitter has betrayed our trust. By allowing hateful content to spread, the company fails to protect users, and Jews in particular,” EUJS president Avital Grinberg said earlier this year, according to a report from Haaretz. “What starts online does not end there. Twitter cultivates real hate and violence, and as such, disregards our democratic values.”
Twitter has since removed several of the offending tweets, but the organizations plan to continue pursuing the lawsuit anyways.
EUJS told Haaretz that, “out of the 6 tweets two are still public, two have been fully removed and two were just blocked for Germany.”
According to a report from The Guardian, “Four of the tweets denied the Holocaust in explicit terms, one said ‘blacks should be gassed and sent with space x to Mars’, while a sixth compared Covid vaccination programmes to mass extermination in Nazi death camps. All were reported in January but Twitter ruled that three of the tweets did not violate its guidelines and failed to respond to the other reports, the legal action claims.”
The accounts in question include @Abdulla74515475, which has three followers, and @RosemaryOConne6, which has 20 followers.
Grinberg told the paper that the decision to sue was made out of “despair, disappointment and anger.”
“All our efforts and advocacy have led nowhere and Twitter has become a space where antisemitism and Holocaust denial is just growing and growing. This is so much bigger than us, so we needed the biggest and strongest tool that democracy has to offer and that is the law,” Grinberg continued.
Josephine Ballon, the head of legal at HateAid, told the paper that censorship is necessary to protect people from wrong opinions about the Holocaust.
“Freedom of expression does not just mean the absence of censorship but ensuring that Twitter is a safe space for users who can be free of fear of being attacked or receiving death threats or holocaust denial. If you are a Jewish person on Twitter then the sad reality is that it is neither secure nor safe for you,” Ballon said.
“We are not demanding anything unreasonable … Just that their moderation is good enough to take down this very dangerous content. This would signal to their users that Twitter care about keeping them safe.”
