Does Facebook have to detect illegal memes?

Lawsuit by Renate Künast Does Facebook have to detect illegal memes? As of: October 27, 2026 • 5:20 a.m

Posts were spread via social media accounts that attributed false quotes to Green Party politician Künast. Künast then sued the Facebook operator Meta. Today the Federal Court of Justice is hearing again.

Before the BGH in Karlsruhe it is about a meme, i.e. an image-text combination that was spread on Facebook. A picture of Green Party politician Renate Künast appeared there in 2015. The sentence: “Integration begins with you as a German learning Turkish!”

However, this alleged quote from Künast was fictitious - false information, which occurs in unmanageable numbers on Facebook and other social networks, in order to denigrate a person or put them in a false light. Künast reported the meme and Facebook removed it. The only problem was: The Künast meme with the false quote kept appearing in numerous variations, often with additional insults against the politician.

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Renate Künast then sued Facebook's parent company Meta. She says: Facebook not only has to find and delete the original false information, but also all similar variants of a posting.

Meta counters that Facebook only has to delete the specific false quotes that are pointed out to it. A search for individual cases by employees, on the other hand, is too time-consuming. For an individual case search, a manual check of the contributions for their meaning is necessary. As a so-called hosting provider, Meta is not obliged to do this.

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The question is whether social media platform operators have to proactively identify fake news posts with the same content after they have been reported once - in order to then delete them. Künast was largely successful in the lower courts. However, the Federal Court of Justice, as the civil court of last instance, suspended the proceedings to await an important ruling from the European Court of Justice.

This has been available since December 2025. At that time, the ECJ ruled in another case that a platform operator must take appropriate measures to ensure that illegally distributed content is not simply copied and published on other websites. The BGH must now decide what consequences this will have in the case of Renate Künast.

This topic in the program: tagesschau.de | Preliminary report BGH hearing: Künast against Meta | Oct 26, 2026 | 16:46