German Legislator Sends Cops To Literally Police Twitter For Porn

Free Speech

from the surely-the-best-use-of-law-enforcement-resources dept

Germany’s awkward relationship with the internet continues. On one hand, the German government has told the EU government it’s not willing to follow orders that involve criminalizing encryption or mandating client-side scanning.

On the other hand, it does things like blacklist Techdirt (this happened in 2012) for supposedly offering up too much porn and violence. It followed that up by trying to block the full release of its list of blocked websites. And, for a brief amount of time, it was illegal to sell adult e-books before 10 pm local time. Yes, you read that correctly.

So, it’s been weird. And it’s not getting better. While the government seems unified against EU demands that will make German internet users less safe, certain government figures are trying to inflict their personal morality on the rest of the nation. And that has led to actual police being tasked with going after people who post porn to the ultimate porn receptacle, the internet.

German police have been targeting and intimidating specific Twitter users who post or retweet explicit material, in an attempt to move forward local bureaucrat Tobias Schmid’s campaign to purge all open platforms of adult content.

Germany’s leading news magazine, Der Spiegel, today devoted an entire feature to the authorities’ campaign to deter users from sharing sexual content, highlighting threats of legal action reported recently by individual users and Wired magazine.

NetzPolitik’s Sebastian Meineck has been covering Schmid’s meticulous, obsessive attempts to ban all sexual content from open platforms in Germany and Europe. In an in-depth report last week, Meineck wrote that authorities had already taken down some 150 Twitter accounts for “distribution of pornography,” over tweets and retweets. He also identified a ramping-up since December, with government media authorities using the police to confront and threaten adult performers, creators and other sex workers over explicit videos and images they tweeted or promoted.

The thing is that Schmid isn’t a particularly influential politician. He’s the State Media Authority director for a single German state. He shouldn’t be able to decide what the rest of the nation can see on Twitter, nor should he be able to mobilize police forces to harass adult performers and sex workers for legally uploading porn to this social media service.

Unfortunately, Schmid has taken a very broad view of a German law — one meant to keep pornographic content from being accessed by children in physical places — and applied it to the internet at large. There’s a single man standing at the center of this new wave of censorship, and he’s somehow managed to talk a bunch of other government employees into participating in this singular crusade.

As XBIZ has been reporting, this current censorship strategy was directly prompted by Tobias Schmid, director of the State Media Authority of North Rhine-Westphalia. An obscure conservative politician who has been described as having “a fetish for order,” Schmid has been waging a one-man war on porn. 

If it weren’t for the involvement of local law enforcement, we’d be well within our sex-and-violence wheelhouse to label this effort “masturbatorial.” Instead, it’s more of a team effort, albeit one that still seems to be a mostly empty display of activity, rather than something prompted by particular passion.

And this effort has resulted in some other nasty collateral damage. Schmid’s one-man war has resulted in the development and deployment of content-scanning software (known as KIVI), which Schmid hopes to spread from his fiefdom to the rest of Europe.

The world is full of politicians who think everyone should align themselves with their personal beliefs. And there are plenty who find laws they can abuse to force people to submit to their moral agendas. Fortunately, Schmid isn’t running the country, just a small part of it. Unfortunately, this report shows he’s capable of inflicting some pretty serious harm to people who were never considered criminals before Schmid took his current post.

Filed Under: adult content, content moderation, free speech, germany, porn