Facebook Facing Lawsuit Over Fake News In German Court; Syrian Refugee Crying Foul

Syrian refugee Anas Modamani's lawsuit against Facebook will be heard on German court on Feb 13 after his selfie with German Chancellor Angela Merkel went viral used on a fake news. Modamani took the selfie with the chancellor in August of 2015.

At first, the photo was published on a front page of a German National Paper and resorted to nightly news as it captured a rare photo of Merkel in a settlement of Syrian refugees in Berlin. However, in some unsolicited event, the photo was used as an image for prevailing fake news that went viral on Facebook. Modamani said in an interview with CNN Tech, "For the first five months, I thought it was a good luck charm. But now I think it's bad luck."

Modamani is asking German court for an injunction ordering Facebook a stop of the fake news circulating with his picture and Chancellor Merkel as well with a complete deletion, on a statement given by his lawyer. The lawyer Cahn-jo Jun added, "Because of the ill-fated course of the selfie, Modamani has repeatedly been accused of terrorism brought forth in many incidents. Facebook has repeatedly refused to take the posts down because there are no rules violated in their company," in an interview published on New York Times.

Facebook, meanwhile issued a press statement, "We are committed to meeting our obligations under German law in relation to content which is shared by people on our platform." In relevance to the fake news, they added, "We have already quickly disabled access to content that has been accurately reported to us by Modamani's legal representatives, so we do not believe that legal action here is necessary or that it is the most effective way to resolve the situation."

However, Modamani's camp is not convinced and further argued that he was accused of the Berlin Terror attack because of Dec 19, 2016, the same picture came out, Modamani claimed that Facebook has insufficiently mishandled the online report system. Reported in The Washington Times, the picture went on viral and was seen more than 200,000 times on fake news before the necessary action was taken in removing it from the site.