At the end of February, Wolfgang Rabe, who is an AfD candidate for the state election, published several quotes of the 2015 deceased former post-WWII chancellor.
All seven statements refer to immigration. “The idea that a modern society would have to be able to establish itself as a multicultural society, with as many cultural groups, I think is outlandish,” said Schmidt in 1992 in an interview. And two years later: “If this continues, there is murder and manslaughter, because there are too many foreigners among us.”
Rabe noted of the cited statements by Schmidt: “Helmut Schmidt and I – we are both ‘Nazis’ – because we agree, with the small difference that he said it 30 years ago.” Rabe was then blocked for 30 days by Facebook.
He has been registered on the social network for more than eight years and has been repeatedly banned. Every time, he says, the ban has been for the dissemination of truth. “We laugh about China, North Korea, etc. because of the censorship taking place there, but our experience is much worse here.”
Facebook justified their ridiculous ban by saying it was a breach of community standards. Rabe’s lawyer Joachim Steinhöfel rejected this. “Helmut Schmidt was one of the most respected and most popular Germans. He was not only Federal Chancellor, but also a publisher of the time “, he told Junge Freiheit.
If Schmidt’s quotes are deleted on Facebook and the user is banned for 30 days, it is “a mixture of stupidity, incompetence and management failure, which is unprecedented,” he added.
“This dilettantism is so unbearable because it goes hand in hand with freedom of expression. The bungling censor, who has to answer for this, should be warned together with his superiors and dismissed in case of recurrence. ”
Steinhöfel has obtained numerous court decisions against Facebook in the past. Lastly, the Higher Regional Court of Stuttgart ruled: “Either there is a hate message, which is prohibited by the contractual standards (and then may be deleted …) or there is a permissible content, information, which may be shared and then not deleted.
“Otherwise, this would mean that a Facebook ban will always be final, if the user does not oppose it.”
The court described the American company as a “quasi-monopolist” enterprise that “not only propagates free access to information and sharing of information”, but on the other hand claims “to establish strict rules that make it the sole decision-making authority of the United States”.
The judgment of the court in Stuttgart is an important milestone, Steinhöfel said on his website. “This wretched game, which documents a complete moral neglect of the monopolist, which will come to an end when we win a Supreme Sourt decision.”
