Facebook’s Fight Against Hate Speech In Europe Begins

This Monday, Facebook launched its initiative to counter hate speech in Germany. The social network is putting up €1 million EUR or $1.1 million USD while partnering with European nonprofit organisations and governments in order to make ways to counter "online extremism" in the continent. The program called Initiative for Civil Courage is based in Berlin and is receiving support from the German government.

The reason the initiative is based in Berlin is that the social media has finally caved in after receiving complaints from politicians, activists and celebrities of the country. The complaints were about how the social network has not done enough moves to restrict xenophobic and racist comments from users, which are said to be triggered by the influx of asylum seekers in Germany.

The issue has garnered too much attention that the country's prosecutors even went on to start a probe on the top executives of Facebook there in November of last year. The probe was called forth after the European executives of the social network failed to remove racist hate speech posted on their platform.

Naturally, the issue has been garnering attention, especially from politicians and celebrities, who are concerned about the rising number of antiforeigner comments as the country struggles to cope up with the influx of refugees recently.

In connection with the issue, the German justice minister has requested a meeting with the social network. The meeting was to remind the social media that it was legally compelled to remove racist posts.

The minister explained that he had received complaints that users who have been flagging the posts were being told that the content of the said post has been checked. The checked content is claimed by Facebook to have passed the social media's house rules.

With the Initiative for Civil Courage, along with other countermeasures that Facebook has set up, it can be said that the social network is taking this campaign against hate messages seriously. Last Friday, the tech company had hired an outsourcing agency that will put up more than a hundred people to look for and remove racist content from their platform.

The move came after the German justice ministry announced in September that they would form a task force with social media platforms to deal with online hate speech. Three months after that, the social media, together with Google and Twitter, has agreed to remove hate speeches posted on their sites within 24 hours following German law, instead of their own terms of service.