There is a tweet being retweeted heavily within the German Twitter community right now which roughly translates as
“BEWARE Nazi-pigs on Twitter! @Heil_Hitler_88 Please block so that the account gets deleted. #nazi #block #rt Please!” (original).
Now, if Twitter had servers in Germany an account like @Heil_Hitler_88 (we’re not linking BTW) would be illegal and would be deleted right away.
Indeed, Twitter itself might well be hauled into court to explain why it isn’t automatically filtering and blocking Nazi material circulating since this is obviously a sensitive subject in Germany and there are specific anti Nazi laws. Ebay famously had to block the sale of Nazi memorabilia in Germany for this reason.
The trouble is, Twitter is in the US, and appears not to have noticed. So the German Twitter community is trying to get Twitter to block the account with this retweeting.
It will be in interesting to see how this plays out. As we’ve seen with the Facebook and the Holocaust issue, this stuff doesn’t go away and needs to be addressed.