What can be on Youtube?

And what can the Google subsidiary delete from its own platform?

In essence, these two questions are at stake in the case of the #allesaufdentisch campaign, which became public on Sunday.

Late in the evening, the Bild newspaper first reported the deletion of two of the more than 50 videos in which artists, scientists, actors and many more commented on various corona issues as a follow-up to #allesdichtmachen.

David Lindenfeld

Volunteer.

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The initiators around the actors Miriam Stein, Volker Bruch and Maxim Mehmet as well as the director Jeana Paraschiva confirmed this on Monday the FAZ The group, which received encouragement, but was also sharply criticized for lack of knowledge, conspiracy and proximity to views of the lateral thinking movement, initiated legal action.

The district court complied with the requests for an injunction and prohibited the deletion of the videos "Incidence" and "Anxiety" on Monday afternoon.

The FAZ has received the decision.

"That is scandalous"

In the justification letter from YouTube, which is also available to the FAZ, the company merely stated that the videos violated the “guidelines on medical misinformation”. Exactly what this misinformation consists of and which passages it is, remained unclear: "The decisions about the deletions and about the complaints we submitted to Youtube were made at unusual times at 04.02, 05.39 or 05.19," said Jeana Paraschiva the FAZ with.

“The times suggest that the decisions were made in a different time zone.

It seems questionable whether a review of the matter actually took place.

We doubt it.

And we also doubt that native speakers who are linguistically and intellectually up to the content have made these decisions. "

The Hamburg lawyer Joachim Steinhöfel, who specializes in such cases, considers the fact that there was only a blanket accusation of misinformation in the YouTube letter to be extremely problematic.

He represents the collective that describes itself as a “loose association of people who care about the political and social future of our country and the world”, as a lawyer.

“It was not communicated what is actually being objected to.

But this has to happen so that the user can react to it.

Here you feel reminded of 'The Trial' by Franz Kafka.

The protagonist is executed in the end, but does not even know the accusation made against him, "said Steinhöfel on request.

The lawyer, who speaks on the subject of freedom of expression in one of the # allesaufdentisch videos, also criticized the general handling of the video platform with deletions of videos on Corona.

“The head of Youtube said in a CNN interview that the platform will delete everything that contradicts the findings of the WHO.

That is downright scandalous. "

Where is the transparency?

The WHO is a regulatory agency of the United Nations, which, according to The Economist's index of democracy, consists of about 25 percent of democracies. The rest are hybrid, authoritarian or totalitarian regimes. "A regulatory authority of such an organization cannot decide on the scope of freedom of expression in Germany."

Even before the approval by the Cologne Regional Court, Steinhöfel had been optimistic that his applications for an interim injunction, which he had made separately for both videos, would be approved, referring to two judgments of the Federal Court of Justice against Facebook from July: “They basically mean that Facebook, and this also applies to other platforms, has no house rights due to its monopoly position. They can't just delete what they want. A certain amount of influence remains with the companies, which are rightly allowed to keep an eye on their business interests. ”This, however, takes precedence after the freedom of expression enshrined in Article 5 of the Basic Law.

YouTube did not respond to our request as to which specific passages in the videos led to the deletion.

After the videos were published, there was a lot of talk about the usefulness of the action.

Now #allesaufdentisch provides the occasion for another debate that puts a question to the tech companies at the center: Where is the transparency?