German Twitter users want to ban use of Nazis' names

More and more accounts using the names of various Nazi leaders are being set up on the social networking site Twitter. German Twitter users are unhappy about this and are doing their best to have the accounts of the fake Adolf Hitlers, Joseph Goebbelses and Rudolf Hesses cancelled. German weekly Der Zeit reports they have not had much success so far.

Der Zeit reports that Twitter accounts including photographs of the original leaders have been set up for almost the entire Nazi elite, including the infamous doctor of the concentration camp at Auschwitz, Joseph Mengele. Hitler’s Twitter profile includes not only his quotes, but Nazi symbols like the swastika or the eagle of the Reich, both of which are banned in Germany.

Most of these fake accounts have been set up in the Spanish language and their owners communicate in Spanish. The account @AdolfHitler has already posted more than 8 600 tweets. In the most recent postings, Die Zeit reports that the fake dictator seems to be reliving the Second World War. “Today I woke up and felt like attacking Poland,” the fake Hitler recently tweeted to his followers, who reportedly has not made any racist tweets yet.

German Twitter users, most of whom come across these false Nazi accounts at random, are doing their best to have them labeled undesirable so the network’s administrators will remove them. They are currently fighting against an account in the name of Adolf Eichmann, one of the main organizers of the Nazi Holocaust.

This is not the first time Twitter has encountered this problem. Two years ago German Twitter users were outraged by the account @Heil_Hitler_88, which its owner used to spread Nazi propaganda, a criminal offense in Germany. After many protests Twitter eventually did erase that account. Die Zeit notes that the network evidently does not use any automatic system to distinguish and filter out obviously fake accounts.

The weekly reports that faking an account violates Twitter’s user rules, which prohibit pretending to be someone you are not. Nevertheless, unlike the ban on obscene or pornographic content, Twitter’s rules do not expressly mention a ban on Nazi propaganda.

Nazi propaganda is illegal in Germany, but Twitter is based in the USA and unlike other large internet companies like Facebook or Google, it does not have a branch in Germany. Die Zeit reports that the application of Twitter’s rules to this particular case would be controversial, as Nazi war criminals are not the only historical personalities with Twitter accounts. Meedia.de reports that Napoleon Bonaparte, Julius Caesar and Joseph Stalin all have accounts in their names as well.