Investigation against Zuckerberg

Corresponding information provided by Würzburg lawyer Chan-jo Jun on Friday was confirmed by the prosecution authority in the Bavarian capital on Monday. "It must now be examined whether the Munich I public prosecutor's office has local jurisdiction and whether there is any conduct relevant under criminal law," the prosecutor's office said. It will "also be examined whether German criminal law applies." The starting point was the complaint filed by a lawyer against Zuckerberg and others. A Facebook spokeswoman had already denied the allegations on Friday.

Jun had already filed similar charges with the Hamburg public prosecutor's office in recent months. The public prosecutor's office then also initiated an investigation, but discontinued it at the beginning of 2016.

The background to the case is the discussion about how to deal with hate messages that users spread via Facebook. Jun justified his complaint by saying that the Facebook managers named in it had been informed by him last year of 438 user posts "with criminal relevance". These included cases of incitement to hatred, support for terrorist organizations and depictions of violence. However, they had not reacted to them. "The responsible employees then violated German law by not removing the illegal content from Facebook after becoming aware of it and continuing to make it publicly available," the lawyer explained.

According to him, in addition to Zuckerberg, the investigations are directed against Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg as well as the European chief lobbyist Richard Allan and his Berlin colleague Eva-Maria Kirschsieper. In total, ten high-ranking company representatives are targeted.

Proceedings already discontinued in Hamburg

The Internet company did not want to comment on the investigations on Friday after the incident became known, but rejected the content of the accusations of the Würzburg lawyer. "Facebook or its employees have not violated German law," a spokesman for the U.S. company said in response. "Hate has no place on Facebook." The Hamburg public prosecutor's office had dropped its investigation against Zuckerberg and other managers of the internationally active Facebook parent company in the spring on the grounds that German law did not apply in these cases.

It also stopped investigating Facebook managers based in Germany because, in its view, they work for the German Facebook subsidiary, which only performs advertising acquisition and similar supporting tasks. By contrast, Facebook manages the profiles of all European users and the associated data traffic via servers in Ireland, which are operated by a subsidiary there. This circumstance also causes conflicts over the applicability of German law in other contexts, such as questions of data protection. Jun criticized the decision of the Hamburg public prosecutor's office as "legally nonsensical".

Facebook has long been criticized for not taking enough action against hate comments. In 2015, the Federal Ministry of Justice had formed a working group with Internet companies such as Facebook and Google. They agreed that German-speaking employees of the companies should receive legal training and that content containing hate crime should generally be removed within 24 hours. However, Justice Minister Heiko Maas accused the providers in early October of not taking consistent enough action. (SDA)