Germany to rule on fake news on Syrian refugees

A Syrian refugee, who brought a case against Facebook over allegations of criminal activity, will find out if the injunction has been successful later today.

Anas Modamani was one of several asylum seekers who took a selfie with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2015 at the height of the refugee crisis. The selfie with Chancellor Angela Merkel came to symbolise Germany’s decision to allow hundreds of thousands of unscreened migrants into Germany.

Modamani’s photo began to appear repeatedly in fake news reports linking him to terrorism, prompting the Syrian refugee to file for an injunction in a court in Wuürzburg. It was one of several cases against Facebook in Germany where fake news about refugees perpetrating crimes, including sexual assault by “Arab mobs”, was widely circulated.

Read: Germany proposes EU relaxes rules on deporting asylum seekers

Last month, the most widely read newspaper in Germany, Bild, apologised for an article that said a “mob” of Arab men had sexually assaulted women on New Year’s Eve in a Frankfurt restaurant, after the police said that an investigation had failed to turn up any evidence.

Modamani’s selfies started appearing in anti-migrant Facebook posts following reports of high-profile crimes within Germany.

According to the New York Times, Modamani’s 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.

The original posts have since been removed because they breached Germany’s privacy laws. But Modamani is seeking an injunction that would force Facebook to actively identify and remove such posts, rather than wait for users to flag them.