How a refugee’s selfie with Merkel led to a Facebook lawsuit

Anas Modamani’s 2015 selfie with Chancellor Angela Merkel came to symbolize her decision to allow hundreds of thousands of unscreened migrants into Germany. But Modamani, a refugee from Syria, sought on Monday to prevent Facebook from allowing users to repost the image, or any altered version of it, after it repeatedly showed up in fake news reports linking him to terrorism, The New York Times reported.

The trial, one of several notable cases against Facebook in Germany, highlights several basic legal questions, such as who is responsible for content posted by anonymous sources and whether people who repost text they did not write, or an image that someone else altered, can be held responsible for defamation. Concern over nationalist and populist propaganda, as well as fake news, is growing in the country ahead of a general election scheduled for September.

The German justice minister, Heiko Maas, has suggested holding Facebook accountable for hate speech posted to its site, and a government-initiated task force that includes representatives from Facebook, Google and Twitter is examining how long it takes the companies to take down posts flagged as hateful. The panel is expected to report its findings in the coming months.

Modamani, now 19, fled Syria for Germany in 2015 and was living in a Berlin shelter when Merkel came to visit in September of that year.

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The selfie that he took with the chancellor and posted to his Facebook page was widely shared on social media, and became an emblem of her immigration policy. But Merkel’s stance on refugees has shaken her support and has helped propel the rise of the populist, far-right Alternative for Germany party.

Modamani has filed for an injunction in a court in Würzburg, in the southern German state of Bavaria, that would require Facebook to remove any content linking him to terrorism.

His lawyer, Chan-jo Jun, says that even though his client deleted the photograph and requested that it be taken down in some postings, it still appears on other people’s social media pages and in fake news reports accusing him of having links to terrorism. The image has been used with posts about the attacks in Brussels last year and on a Christmas market in Berlin. Recently, someone posted Modamani’s photograph on Facebook and said that he had been involved in a December attack in which a homeless man in Berlin was set on fire.

Modamani’s lawyer argued that his client would continue to be a victim of libel until Facebook used its algorithms to prevent the image from being reproduced.

“I want peace in my life,” the teenager told reporters after the hearing. “Not everyone believes that. Many people hate me, but all I did was take a selfie with Merkel.”

Source: MENA