Holger Münch, president of Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), has called for stronger action from online platforms and prosecutors on tackling online hate crimes.
In an interview with the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland (RND) news agency, he said: “We see that polarization is increasing further, and that criminal acts are increasingly being committed from the left.”
While politicians on the left of the political spectrum and the Greens were most often the target of attacks, attacks on the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) were in second place, he said.
Politicians at local level were failing to lay charges in response to online attacks, Münch said.
This was happening in only 11% of all cases. “That is far too little. Apparently, there is a lack of trust,” he said.
“Therefore, we need to send the signal that law enforcement authorities are capable of consistently pursuing such offences,” he said.
Münch said he considers problematic content on social media as a factor that contributes to radicalization.
“Here we have evidently recognizable risks to society, and for that reason corresponding obligations have to be introduced for social media, so that providers themselves search for, report and delete criminal content,” he said.
He warned that if people received only one-sided information, social media could become a “radicalization machine.”
Münch described the results to date from the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which requires providers to report criminal content, as disastrous.
The BKA had received just 61 reports over the course of a year. He added: “And we cannot enforce different behaviour because there is no system for fines.”
