German MP investigated over anti-Muslim tweets

The deputy leader of Germany’s far-right AfD Party is facing a police investigation after she made anti-Muslim remarks on Twitter on new year’s eve. She could face charges of incitement to hatred.

Beatrix von Storch accused Cologne police of appeasing “barbaric, gang-raping Muslim hordes of men” after officers tweeted a new year greeting in Arabic, the BBC reports.

Twitter removed the tweet and suspended von Storch’s account for 12 hours for breaching the site’s rules on hate speech. After regaining access to her account, she wrote: “Facebook has now also censored me. This is the end of the constitutional state.”

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Von Storch’s tweets came as Germany began to enforce strict new rules governing hate speech on social media, which could result in sites like Twitter and Facebook being fined up to £44m if they fail to remove “obviously illegal” material within 24 hours of being notified.

Internet activists and journalists have joined the AfD in opposing the new law, says Deutsche Welle, “not least because the government has deliberately left the task of deleting content or blocking users to the internet platforms themselves, rather than having courts make decisions”.