Germany Was This Jewish Writer’s Safe Haven From Twitter Trolls
A “Pepe” meme posted on Twitter. Image by twitter
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
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
