Germany is now targeting Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and other company executives, as part of an investigation into hate speech on the platform.
The preliminary inquiry by the Munich prosecutor’s office is the result of a lawsuit filed by German attorney Chan-jo Jun regarding hateful Facebook posts. The complaint specifically names Zuckerberg, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and other European execs, reports Der Spiegel.
Jun has reportedly listed 438 Facebook postings that include threats of violence, Holocaust denial, and references to Nazi-era genocide. The lawsuit alleges Facebook did not delete the specified posts over the past year despite the fact they were flagged as inappropriate.
A similar complaint brought against the company by Jun was rejected on the grounds that Facebook was not liable under German law, as its European operations are based outside the country in Ireland.
Facebook claims it has not broken German law, which prohibits the publication of such categories of speech, and is actively patrolling and deleting hate speech from its platform.
“We are not commenting on the status of a possible investigation but we can say that the allegations lack merit and there has been no violation of German law by Facebook or its employees,” said a Facebook spokesperson in a statement. “There is no place for hate on Facebook. We work closely with partners to fight hate speech and foster counter speech.”
Facebook, under its own regulations, defines hate speech as: “Content that attacks people based on their actual or perceived race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability or disease.” It claims it removes content, disables accounts and works with law enforcement when it believes the material in question poses “a genuine risk of physical harm or direct threats to public safety.”
In the face of mounting public pressure, Facebook hired a German firm to quickly delete hate speech at the start of the year. In May, the company (alongside a number of other tech giants, including Twitter and YouTube) agreed to new EU rules that demanded online hate speech be removed within 24 hours.
Germany’s strict laws regarding incitement to hatred have in the past been applied to cases regarding anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. The country has been trying to crack down on what it alleges is a rise in hate speech online resulting from the refugee crisis in Europe.
Discord is trying to push more visibility on the internet for some of its biggest communities, and there's a good chance your messages could end up in a Google Search. The platform is preparing to make conversations from certain public servers searchable on the web, so there's a privacy setting you might want to check before the rollout begins.
According to Discord's official announcement, the changes will roll out in two stages. Starting November 16, qualifying servers will have public web pages featuring automated summaries of conversations. By mid-December, individual messages from eligible public channels could also appear word-for-word in Google and other search engines.
You just opened X and started typing your thoughts. Imagine the jump scare when a hand suddenly pops up on your screen, pointing at the promote button. It doesn’t say a word and simply points. For a growing number of X users, this isn’t a made-up scenario but something they have been seeing since yesterday, and very few of them are amused.
Most of us have learned to tune out the usual in-app upsells, whether it’s a glowing upgrade banner or a pop-up about a premium plan. A floating hand hovering over your draft is much harder to ignore, and that’s probably the whole point.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?