The member of the Bundestag Renate Künast (Die Grünen) has won a victory against the Facebook group Meta before the Frankfurt Regional Court.

As the court announced on Friday, it had upheld a lawsuit by the politician and decided that a meme with a false quote from Künast may not be distributed on Facebook in this form or in slightly modified versions.

The meme consisted of a picture of Künast with the quote "Integration starts with you learning Turkish as a German!"

The district court found that this quote was incorrect.

Künast never made the statement.

However, the post was published in different versions, each of which had a different URL than the original post.

Among other things, the layout was changed, text content was added or omitted, typos were inserted or pixels that were imperceptible to the eye were changed.

10,000 euros in compensation for Künast

As a press chamber of the court found, the politician had been violated in her personal rights by the distribution of this false quote.

Because Künast specifically pointed out to the group that the sentence was incorrectly put into her mouth, she does not have to do this every time for every other URL.

It is also not difficult for Facebook to see “that variants with essentially the same content are false quotes”.

The judges further said: Facebook had not argued in court that it was technically and economically unreasonable for the company to find the memes in question without the respective URL.

In addition, the Künast court awarded compensation of EUR 10,000 because Meta, on whose platform the offending posts were published, shared responsibility.

The group has not fulfilled its obligation to free its platform from further false quotes.

Künast therefore had to endure hostilities.

“Credibility is the capital of every human being, especially a politician.

This credibility is damaged by attribution of misquotations.

This is dishonorable and affects the personality rights of the misquoted.

Misquotes also distort the battle of opinions and harm the general public.”

The judgment is not final, an appeal to the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court is possible.