German Prosecutors Think It’s Funny People’s Homes Are Being Raided And Their Devices Seized Because They Said Stuff On The Internet

Pretty fascinating. English translation:

Just Liking Can Be Punishable

08/22/2022 by Lars Sobiraj Reading time: 3 min.

Simply liking other people's posts on Facebook and similar platforms can be punishable under certain conditions, according to the Meiningen Regional Court.

Whether the like is punishable depends on whether the liked post itself contained criminal content. This emerges from a decision by the Meiningen Regional Court (LG Meiningen, Decision of 08/05/2022, 6 Qs 146/22).

Background: A Facebook user from Thuringia had liked another user's post. The case concerns the murder of police officers in the Kusel district on January 31, 2022. The author wrote as a title "Not a single second of silence for these creatures."

The Meiningen public prosecutor's office then obtained a search warrant for the apartment, car, and person who had liked the post. By liking the post, the Facebook user had committed both the defamation of the memory of the deceased under § 189 of the Criminal Code and the rewarding and approval of criminal acts under § 140 of the Criminal Code, according to the application.

The police hoped to find evidence such as smartphones or PCs to analyze the storage media. They were also allowed to search the suspect's cloud storage.

After the raid, the accused hired Berlin criminal and media lawyer Ehssan Khazaeli. Khazaeli filed a complaint against the search warrant. He sharply criticized the decision: "By liking a post, it remains clear that it is someone else's post – there can be no talk of 'making it one's own,'" he stated yesterday. One cannot attach one's own intellectual statement to a mere like.

He also argued that his client had not approved of any crime. While it was tasteless to comment on the murdered police officer's funeral in such a way, Khazaeli does not consider his client's action criminally relevant.

A constitutional complaint is to be filed against both decisions next month. "This isn't about the individual case, but about the fundamental question of whether merely liking on social media can be punishable," said attorney Ehssan Khazaeli. This approach is not an isolated case. We had previously reported about a search warrant issued because of a like on Twitter.

However, the Meiningen District Court's view was supported by the Meiningen Regional Court. The original user's post was considered a defamation of the memory of the deceased under § 189 of the Criminal Code, according to the judgment. The judges view the like as an expression of approval of the author's statements on Facebook. By doing so, the searched person publicly showed that they shared the opinion of the person who defamed the funeral of the killed police officers.

The media would also evaluate particularly public-facing posts based on how many likes they receive. The more attention a posting receives, the greater the likelihood that it will also be covered in the media.

@macniel@feddit.org What's your feeling on this one? You said "Who do you suppose are the people suffering a 6:00am door-knock?" and then got extremely indirect about answering the question, but it sounds like what you were implying is that they deserve it and the law is doing its job. Do you think this person deserves to be charged for this as well?