In an attempt to escape and avoid online hate from pro-Nazis, some Twitter users are changing their account locations to Germany - where local laws prevent pro-Nazi content. This hack is good to filter much of the unwanted hate speech - but doesn’t reassure internet utopia, CNBC reports:
But local residents and researchers say German Twitter is not exactly the internet utopia some imagine.
“We are not the paradise of social media without any hate speech whatsoever,” said Stephan Dreyer, a senior media law and governance researcher at the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Germany.
While the most obvious expressions of Nazism and racism may be harder to find on Twitter accounts with their locations set to Germany, there is still plenty of coded content that slips through the cracks, Dreyer said.
Even with the difference in enforcement in Germany (and its tighter policies on content moderation), Twitter still relies heavily on its users to report and moderate inappropriate content on their platform.
It isn’t an internet utopia afterall.
(via Reddit )
image credit: Howard Lake via wikimedia commons