Mind copying and pasting please? That's behind a paywall.
MENU
Financial Times
SIGN IN
Social Media
Angela Merkel attacks Twitter over Trump ban
Russian dissident Alexei Navalny echoes criticisms levelled by German chancellor’s spokesman
Angela Merkel with Donald Trump in 2017. Through her spokesman, Germany’s chancellor said free speech was a ‘fundamental right of vital importance’ © Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
January 11, 2021 5:33 pm by Guy Chazan in Berlin, Henry Foy in Moscow and Hannah Murphy in San Francisco
Angela Merkel, German chancellor, has sharply criticised Twitter’s decision to ban US president Donald Trump, calling it a “problematic” breach of the “fundamental right to free speech”.
Twitter suspended Mr Trump’s account last week in the aftermath of the riots at the Capitol Building, citing “repeated and severe” violations of its civic integrity policies. Facebook has taken similar action.
But Ms Merkel said through her spokesman that the US government should follow Germany’s lead in adopting laws that restrict online incitement, rather than leaving it up to platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to make up their own rules.
The intervention highlights a key area of disagreement between the US and Europe on how to regulate social media platforms. The EU wants to give regulators more powers to force internet platforms such as Facebook or Twitter to remove illegal content.
In the US, technology companies have traditionally been left to themselves to police their own sites, though momentum is gathering behind political moves to curtail their regulatory freedoms. Several members of Congress are working on bills which would limit the legal protections social media companies have from being sued for third-party content posted on their sites. Others are pushing for a new federal data privacy bill that could mirror the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.
Recommended
The limits on free speech in the internet era
Twitter’s share price fell more than 7 per cent on Monday to about $48, as investors were spooked by the renewed debate into the prospect of tighter social media regulation.
Ms Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said free speech was a “fundamental right of vital importance” that could be restricted, “but only in accordance with the laws and within a framework defined by the legislator — not by the decision of the management of social media platforms”.
He said for that reason the chancellor found it “problematic” that Mr Trump’s accounts had been indefinitely suspended.
Mr Seibert referred to a German law on online hate speech that came into force in 2018, putting the country at the forefront of global efforts to police the internet.
The Network Enforcement Act requires social media to remove potentially illegal material within 24 hours of being notified or face fines of up to €50m. It is considered one of the western world’s toughest restrictions on online content.
Ms Merkel’s criticism of the ban was echoed by France’s finance minister Bruno Le Maire. He told France Inter on Monday that he was “shocked” by Twitter’s move. He added: “Digital regulation should not be done by the digital oligarchy itself . . . Regulation of the digital arena is a matter for the sovereign people, governments and the judiciary.”
The ban has also come under attack from Alexei Navalny, the prominent Russian blogger and dissident. He called it “an unacceptable act of censorship” that would be used by the Kremlin to justify his own blacklisting by state media.
“The ban on Twitter is a decision of people we don’t know in accordance with a procedure we don’t know,” he said in a Twitter message, adding that the decision was “based on emotions and personal political preferences”.
“This precedent will be exploited by the enemies of freedom of speech around the world,” he wrote. “In Russia as well. Every time when they need to silence someone, they will say: ‘this is just common practice, even Trump got blocked on Twitter.’”
Recommended
Twitter vs Trump: has Big Tech gone too far?
Mr Navalny is recuperating in Germany after he was poisoned by a nerve agent in an attack he says was orchestrated by the Russian secret services.
He said if Twitter wanted to block people, it could “create some sort of a committee that can make such decisions”.
He added: “We need to know the names of the members of this committee, understand how it works, how its members vote and how we can appeal against their decisions.”
Twitter’s move against Mr Trump was also condemned by Vladimir Soloviev, one of Russia’s leading state media propagandists. “So it is argued that the US Constitution is lower than the internal documents of the Twitter company?” he wrote on his Telegram channel.
“Is it permissible for private companies to create zones free from the American constitution?” said Mr Soloviev, who hosts a weekly television show dedicated to what Russian president Vladimir Putin has done that week. “This is not just a story about Trump.”
Separately, Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman militant leader of Chechnya, remarked that he and Mr Trump were now united in censorship, after his accounts on Facebook and Instagram were blocked.
“Now I have something in common with Donald Trump: whereas previously he blocked my accounts on social networks, now the Almighty God has restored justice, and, as a result, the accounts of the mutinous Donald Trump were also blocked,” Mr Kadyrov wrote on his Telegram channel.
Mr Seibert said that while objecting to outright bans, Ms Merkel had no objection to Twitter or Facebook warning users that some content — say, certain tweets by the US president alleging electoral fraud — was misleading.
He said social media companies bore “a great deal of responsibility for ensuring that political communication is not poisoned by hatred, lies and incitement to violence. And it’s right that they don’t stand idly by when content is posted on certain channels that falls into such categories.”
On Sunday, Parler, a niche Twitter rival popular among the far-right, was forced offline after Amazon withdrew its cloud services to the platform, citing its repeated failure to clamp down on content that incites violence. That followed similar moves by Google and Apple which banned the app from their app stores over the weekend on the same grounds.
“I never thought we’d be living in a country . . . where you could get co-ordinated companies cancelling what you’re doing,” John Matze, chief executive of Parler, told Fox News on Monday.
He added that his “billion-dollar company” had contacted other “big tech players” in order to find an alternative web-hosting provider, but been turned down.
Parler, a self-described “unbiased social media network” that purports to champion “free speech”, received 9.6m installs globally in 2020, about 7.8m of which were in the US, according to data from Sensor Tower.
Additional reporting by Kiran Stacey in Washington
Letters in response to this article:
Merkel should remember words of US constitution / From George Halstead, Silver Spring, MD, US
Merkel seeks clarity on social media’s obligations / From Jem Eskenazi, London N3, UK
Copyright The Financial Times Limited . All rights reserved. Please don't copy articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.
Latest on
Twitter Inc
Convertible debt sold by high-flying US groups falls back to Earth
May 27, 2021 9:00 am
Tipping on social media is a troubling development for online workers
May 25, 2021 4:00 am
India police visit Twitter offices after tweet row
May 24, 2021 5:30 pm
How cultish social media accounts fuel trading in penny stocks
May 18, 2021 4:00 am
Big Tech Is Now Bigger Tech
April 30, 2021 6:13 pm
Content not loading? Subscribers can also read Angela Merkel attacks Twitter over Trump ban on ft.com Read now
Legal & Privacy
Terms & Conditions
Slavery Statement
Privacy
Cookies
Copyright
FT and ‘Financial Times’ are trademarks of The Financial Times Ltd.
The Financial Times and its journalism are subject to a self-regulation regime under the FT Editorial Code of Practice.