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
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
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 week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
