Germany Was This Jewish Writer’s Safe Haven From Twitter Trolls
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
By Ari Feldman February 5, 2018
Virginia Heffernan, a writer who once converted to Judaism and has raised Jewish children, was encountering rampant harassment and abuse from neo-Nazis on Twitter. So she went to Germany — sort of.
In an article for Wired, Heffernan told of how she changed her “location” on Twitter to Germany in the hopes that Germany’s strict laws about hate speech and Holocaust denial would scrub neo-Nazis from her feed. The country’s hate speech laws were passed in 1960 and thoroughly updated in June 2017, in reforms called the Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz, or NetzDG.
Though the laws were rushed into law and contain many errors and confusing passages, Heffernan reported “No Zyklon B in the old Twitterfeed since I moved to make-believe Germany in late November” — a reference to the gas used in Nazi gas chambers. Her location according to Twitter is now Wildbad, a stately spa town near Stuttgart.
“Essentially, the laws are a bold imperialist SuperNannyState move by the Western nation still most determined not to repeat its past,” Heffernan wrote. “As a mother to two wildbad kids, I love a good nanny.”
Contact Ari Feldman at [email protected] or on Twitter @aefeldman
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
