Facebook says it has deleted the accounts, pages and groups linked to virus conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers in Germany who are vocal opponents of government restrictions to control the coronavirus pandemic.
A German regulator on Tuesday slapped a three-month ban on Facebook collecting user data from WhatsApp accounts and
referred the case to an EU watchdog, citing concerns about election integrity.
Facebook will roll out its news platform in Germany from May, providing articles from around 100 existing German media
outlets, the US-based tech giant said Monday.
German residents have been left confused after being targeted by the British government with a Facebook campaign about the corona pandemic, with social media users asking why the money isn’t being spent by the UK government in its own country.
With growing dangers from far-right extremist groups and torrents of threats against politicians, Germany is set to toughen
online speech laws and tighten the screws on social networks.
Facebook announced on Friday changes to the way political advertisements are handled on the social media site ahead of the upcoming European Parliament elections.
Facebook users should be asked for consent before data collected by the group's subsidiaries Whatsapp and Instagram and on third-party websites is combined with their social network account, Germany's competition authority said Thursday.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced Friday she would close her Facebook account, taking another step in a long farewell from politics in her final term in office.
France and Germany jointly agreed a scaled-back version of an EU digital tax Tuesday, that they hoped would break
significant opposition to the plan amongst bloc partners.
German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said in an interview for publication Sunday he backed a global minimum fiscal regime for multinationals as Europe looks to levy tax notably on US tech giants.
EU finance ministers battled Saturday over a controversial proposal to slap a European tax on US tech giants amid rising worries that it is ineffective and protectionist.
Half a year ago, a controversial new German law came into force with the aim of combating hate speech on social media. On Friday, Youtube and Facebook published first figures on how often it has been used.
Facebook must grant the parents of a dead girl access as heirs to their daughter's user account, which had been blocked for five and a half years, the Federal Court of Justice (BGH) ruled on Thursday.
A leading politician from German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative party warned Monday that Facebook's dominance
makes competition "impossible", joining a broadside against the social network from Berlin.
Facebook on Wednesday admitted that up to 87 million people could have been affected by the unauthorized leak of data to Cambridge Analytica, with 310,000 Germans potentially hit.
Germany's justice minister on Monday said Facebook should face "stricter" oversight and be more transparent with its users, as the tech giant struggles to contain the fallout from a huge data privacy scandal.
Germany is the latest country to demand answers from Facebook after it emerged data from 50 million users was used to inform targeted election campaigns. German Justice Minister Katharina Barley on Thursday called such methods "a danger to democracy."
A German court has found Facebook is breaching data protection rules with privacy settings that over-share by default and by requiring users to give real names, a consumer rights organisation said Monday.
Germany's competition watchdog said
on Tuesday that Facebook was abusing its dominant position to "limitlessly" harvest user data from outside websites and apps, allowing its advertisers to
target customers with hyper-specific ads.
Photo platform Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, has plans to adjust its terms of use in Germany after a consumer protection agency called the current terms a "catastrophe."
Two weeks before the Bundestag (German parliament) election, Sarah Rambatz is withdrawing from the campaign in Hamburg after a post she wrote on Facebook led to outrage on social media.
Members of Die Partei have taken over closed Facebook pages belonging to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), and in the process shown how bots are running aspects of their election campaign.
