Germany fines Facebook for under-reporting complaints

Berlin: German authorities have fined Facebook 2 million euros ($2.3 million; Dh8 million) for under-reporting complaints about illegal content on its social media platform in breach of the country’s law on internet transparency.

In a statement on Tuesday, Germany’s Federal Office of Justice said that by tallying only certain categories of complaints, the web giant had created a skewed picture of the extent of violations on its platform.

Faced with a global backlash over the role its platform played in election campaigns from the United States and Britain to the Philippines, Facebook has been on a public relations drive to improve its image.

Under Germany’s network transparency law, social media platforms are required to report the number of complaints of illegal content they have received. The charge that Facebook did not report the full extent of the complaints it received could undermine its drive to burnish its reputation.

Facebook did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the ruling, which it can appeal.

Newly appointed Justice Minister Christine Lambrecht said the option for making a complaint under the transparency law was harder to find on Facebook than an option for complaining that a post violated the platform’s community standards.

“It is quite clear that Facebook’s community standards do not correspond to the standards of the law,” she told reporters at Frankfurt Airport.

Tallying only reports made under the harder-to-find complaints procedure led to artificially low numbers.

In 2018, Facebook said it had received 1,048 complaints relating to illegal content on its platform over the second half of that year, according to its transparency report.

By contrast, transparency reports from Twitter and Google’s YouTube video service both reported well over a quarter of a million complaints for the whole year.

Scarred by the memory of the two authoritarian police states on its territory over the past century, Germany has some of the world’s strictest privacy and hate speech laws, latterly combined with some of the strictest social media regulations.