German Prosecutors Think It’s Funny People’s Homes Are Being Raided And Their Devices Seized Because They Said Stuff On The Internet

Pretty fascinating. English translation:

Just Liking Can Be Punishable

08/22/2022 by Lars Sobiraj Reading time: 3 min.

Simply liking other people's posts on Facebook and similar platforms can be punishable under certain conditions, according to the Meiningen Regional Court.

Whether the like is punishable depends on whether the liked post itself contained criminal content. This emerges from a decision by the Meiningen Regional Court (LG Meiningen, Decision of 08/05/2022, 6 Qs 146/22).

Background: A Facebook user from Thuringia had liked another user's post. The case concerns the murder of police officers in the Kusel district on January 31, 2022. The author wrote as a title "Not a single second of silence for these creatures."

The Meiningen public prosecutor's office then obtained a search warrant for the apartment, car, and person who had liked the post. By liking the post, the Facebook user had committed both the defamation of the memory of the deceased under § 189 of the Criminal Code and the rewarding and approval of criminal acts under § 140 of the Criminal Code, according to the application.

The police hoped to find evidence such as smartphones or PCs to analyze the storage media. They were also allowed to search the suspect's cloud storage.

After the raid, the accused hired Berlin criminal and media lawyer Ehssan Khazaeli. Khazaeli filed a complaint against the search warrant. He sharply criticized the decision: "By liking a post, it remains clear that it is someone else's post – there can be no talk of 'making it one's own,'" he stated yesterday. One cannot attach one's own intellectual statement to a mere like.

He also argued that his client had not approved of any crime. While it was tasteless to comment on the murdered police officer's funeral in such a way, Khazaeli does not consider his client's action criminally relevant.

A constitutional complaint is to be filed against both decisions next month. "This isn't about the individual case, but about the fundamental question of whether merely liking on social media can be punishable," said attorney Ehssan Khazaeli. This approach is not an isolated case. We had previously reported about a search warrant issued because of a like on Twitter.

However, the Meiningen District Court's view was supported by the Meiningen Regional Court. The original user's post was considered a defamation of the memory of the deceased under § 189 of the Criminal Code, according to the judgment. The judges view the like as an expression of approval of the author's statements on Facebook. By doing so, the searched person publicly showed that they shared the opinion of the person who defamed the funeral of the killed police officers.

The media would also evaluate particularly public-facing posts based on how many likes they receive. The more attention a posting receives, the greater the likelihood that it will also be covered in the media.

@[email protected] What's your feeling on this one? You said "Who do you suppose are the people suffering a 6:00am door-knock?" and then got extremely indirect about answering the question, but it sounds like what you were implying is that they deserve it and the law is doing its job. Do you think this person deserves to be charged for this as well?

From the comment you reposted:

They’re the great-grandkids, and I’d take a bet that more than a few of them were not born in Germany, they’re either 1st or 2nd generation immigrants or refugees from somewhere outside of the EU.

This is near certainly false and also pretty hateful itself.

My guess is that most of the people impacted by these raids are very much German by ancestry and usually not that young either. And with the exception of some cases related to some very petty politicians, it usually is extremely hateful stuff that I as a mod here would certainly remove on sight, no questions asked.

1. You want to reformat that comment not to be code-formatted, it scrolls horizontally off the screen for me.
2. Raiding someone's home and taking their devices because they called a politician a penis is horrifying. I don't know why you want to imply that there's anything wrong or misleading about a story reporting on it or similar raids, or bring in some irrelevancies about World War 2 to make it look different. I'm aware that the German free speech laws are different from America's in ways that are attributable to the war and the realities of trying to rebuild a functioning society after, and I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but as far as I can tell that whole conversation has only the vaguest extrapolatory connection with this conversation.
3. Techdirt is great. They are reliable and serious even if they are casual in presentation sometimes. "Anonymous coward" is an homage to Slashdot which invented the term and was in some ways the grandaddy of all comment sections and link aggregators that came after it.

I think you want to render the text as a quote using >, not as code using ```. It looks a bit weird with syntax highlighting...