Authored by John Rosenthal via DailySceptic.org,
Data provided in a German Government response to a parliamentary question on online censorship show that Google met with top German government officials dozens of times between early 2022 and spring 2024 to discuss suppression of online “hate speech” and “disinformation”.
Major online platforms and search engines (X, Facebook, TikTok, Google, etc.) are required to take measures to suppress “illegal hate speech” – i.e., illegal per the standard of European laws – and allegedly harmful “disinformation” under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). As shown in the US House Judiciary Committee’s recent report on European censorship of the internet, the tech companies are in constant contact with EU officials on DSA “enforcement”.
But the German Government’s parliamentary response shows that there have been regular and extensive contacts with the German Government on these subjects as well – and that by far the most frequent such contacts have been with Google. The DSA creates censorship prerogatives not just for the EU as such, but also for EU member states, and Germany is known to make particularly ample use of these prerogatives. It is indeed national “speech laws”, of which Germany has the strictest in Europe, that platforms are required to enforce under the DSA.
The revelations are relevant not just to Germans, but also to Americans, British and indeed the world, because DSA enforcement is neither territorially nor linguistically limited. It applies to all speech in any language from any source anywhere in the world: i.e., so long as it is visible via the internet in the European Union. Online platforms may choose to comply by geo-blocking certain content – in particular, alleged “hate speech” – just in the EU where it is illegal. But they also can and frequently do take the technologically simpler and less costly path of removing the content in question outright.
Moreover, the DSA explicitly sanctions the use of visibility-filtering – i.e., algorithmically limiting the reach of content rather than removing it – and visibility-filtering is necessarily global. It affects the discoverability and visibility of speech all around the world. As shown here, under the pressure of the DSA, visibility-filtering has become the go-to method employed by social media platforms to suppress alleged ‘mis-’ or ‘disinformation’.
Search engines like Google can, of course, act even more decisively to restrict the reach of alleged ‘disinformation’: namely, by downranking websites or webpages in search results or even excluding them altogether.
The parliamentary question submitted by Germany’s opposition AfD (Alternative for Germany) party in March 2024 expressly relates to both censorship methods, or what its authors describe as “removal or reach throttling of user posts or user accounts”.
Both question and answer bear the title “Meetings of Representatives of the Federal Government with [Tech] Companies and Funded Non-Governmental Organisations on the Topics of ‘Hate’ or ‘Disinformation on the Internet’”. A first set of data provided in the Government response concerns meetings with NGOs. These include, for instance, the publicly-funded German NGO HateAid, which has been assigned the status of a “trusted flagger” of allegedly problematic online content under the DSA.
A second set of data covers the meetings on “hate speech” and “disinformation” with the tech companies themselves. It provides details – date, place, participants, topic, etc. – on no fewer than 53 meetings in the stated time period. An excerpt can be seen below. (The Government also included a few meetings on other topics, such as the protection of minors, in the data.)
It should be noted that, by the Government’s own admission, the data are not exhaustive and only cover meetings involving top German government officials, such as ministers or ‘state secretaries’ – i.e., the highest-level civil servants in German government ministries. Lower-level contacts are explicitly not included, and the Government response notes that it has no legal obligation to record all meetings, i.e., even at the highest levels.
Some of the meetings were publicised by the German government at the time of their occurrence, but most of them were confidential. This is noted in the data, with some of the meetings even being deemed “not suitable” for public knowledge. In other cases, it was merely deemed “unnecessary” to inform the public.
The data include, for instance, a January 2023 meeting in San Francisco between Elon Musk, who had only just recently completed his acquisition of Twitter, and the German government’s then minister for digital affairs Volker Wissing. The subject of the meeting was “how Twitter deals with false information, new requirements under the Digital Services Act”. This meeting was publicised in Germany.
The data also include no fewer than 13 meetings with representatives of Meta on topics like “disinformation in the context of RUS[sian] war against UKR[aine]” (March 3rd 2022 at the Digital Affairs Ministry in Berlin) and “questions of cybersecurity and how Meta deals with disinformation” (February 12th 2024, with a German Interior Ministry official in Menlo Park, California). TikTok was involved in seven of the meetings.
But by far the greatest number of meetings were with Google. Google participated in no fewer than 34 of the meetings included in the data, and no fewer than 29 of them were bilateral meetings between Google or its parent company, Alphabet, and the German government. YouTube, a Google subsidiary, was also sometimes involved.
Then German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, identified by the initials “BK” (Bundeskanzler), participated in two of the meetings with Google and three of the meetings overall. Other participants on the German side included Scholz’s chief of staff Wolfgang Schmidt; another top Scholz advisor, state secretary Jörg Kukies; the minister of the interior, Nancy Faeser; the minister of justice, Marco Buschmann; the economics minister, Robert Habeck; two top officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; a top official of the Ministry of Digital Affairs; and Klaus Müller, the head of the agency responsible for German DSA implementation, the Federal Network Agency. Müller remains the President of the Federal Network Agency under current German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. The vice-president of the agency, Wilhelm Eschweiler, also met with Google on two different occasions.
Participants from Google’s side included Alphabet/Google CEO Sundar Pichai; Alphabet/Google’s President of Global Affairs; the Google Vice-President for Trust and Safety; and Google’s Director of Government Affairs and Public Policy. CEO Sundar Pichai personally participated in no fewer than four of the meetings.
Topics discussed included “hate speech, fake news and disinformation on the web”, “disinformation in the context of RUS[sian] war against UKR[aine]”, “Digital Services Act and how to deal with mis- and disinformation on platforms”, “disinformation and DSA”, “disinformation, resilient democracy, illegal content, hate crime”, “strengthening the resilience of democracy and dealing with disinformation”, “key challenges of Google and YouTube with respect to cybersecurity and disinformation”, and so on and so forth.
Among other venues, meetings took place at the German Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other relevant ministries in Berlin, as well as at the offices of the Federal Network Agency.
No fewer than three of the meetings took place at the Federal Chancellery in Berlin, the German equivalent of the White House.
