Facebook has been charged with a violation of the law on internet transparency of Germany and has been fined 2 million euros ($2.26 million) by the regulators in the country. The allegation against the largest social media platform of the world was that it had provided a distorted picture about the quantity of illegal content on its platform.

The United States based tech giant had intentionally created a skewed picture by the company publishing information details that were incomplete in relation to the complaints it had got, said the Federal Office of Justice of Germany, which is a judicial agency, in a statement that was issued on Tuesday.

Over the last year or so, Facebook has been engaged in a massive exercise to better its public image and reputation after it faced severe criticisms from all across the world of the lucid role of the company on third parties and unethical forces making use of its platform for meddling with the election campaigns in various parts of the world – ranging from the United States to the United Kingdom to the Philippines.

The network transparency law of Germany mandates that all the social media platforms have to mandatorily submit reports of the number complaints that it gets from users and other people about illegal content that is published on the platform to the concerned authorities of the country. According to analysts and experts, the efforts of Facebook to refurbish its tarnished image because of the multiple privacy scandals and its alleged lack of proactive attitude to control hate speech on the platform could be undermined by the charge against its Germany that it had underreported incidents of violations on the platform.

“This creates a distorted picture of the scale of illegal content on the platform and the way Facebook deals with it,” the office said. “The report contains only a fraction of the complaints of illegal information.”

According to the transparency report filed with the authorities by Facebook, during the second half of the 2018, Facebook is alleged to have reported that it had received 1,048 complaints relating to illegal content on its platform, the company had said earlier in 2018.

In comparison, the transparency reports published by other tech companies such as Twitter and Google’s YouTube video service were much larger – both reporting to have received much more than a quarter of a million complaints for the entire year of 2018.

Germany has instituted some of the strictest privacy and hate speech laws in the world which are implemented in combination with some of the strictest social media regulations after it had been scarred by the memory of the two authoritarian police states on its territory over the past century.

(Adapted from TodayOnline.com)