German Government Sued By Elon Musk’s X over ‘Unlawful’ Censorship Demands, Privacy Infringements

Elon Musk’s X social media firm announced it has launched legal cases in Germany against government “overreach” against the platform’s users’ privacy and freedom of expression.

Amid increasing scrutiny of the censorship regime in Germany in the wake of U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, the Global Government Affairs division of X said on Monday that it has filed lawsuits in courts across the country to challenge the lawfulness of censorship demands.

In a statement, the American tech giant claimed that Germany subunits the “highest number of legal demands for user data to X within the European Union”.

The Global Government Affairs team went on to assert that 87 per cent of these demands came in the form of “speech-related offences”.

“X believes that these legal demands for user data are unlawful and has taken cases in both German federal and state courts challenging the lawfulness of the government’s overreach into our users’ privacy and freedom of expression,” they said.

Musk and his platform have increasingly become targets for the German political establishment for lifting many speech restrictions that came to define the end of the old Twitter management and for expressing his personal support for the anti-mass migration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the upcoming federal elections.

In the final town hall event before voters head to the polls on Sunday, Green party chancellor candidate and current finance minister, Robert Habeck, called for creating a European-based and controlled social media platform within the next two years.

Habeck claimed that “Chinese algorithms and Elon Musk’s right-wing radical fantasies” were impacting the “opinion formation” and thereby influencing “our democracy”. Thus, the Green politician called for increased regulation on Chinese and American tech companies in Germany.

Perhaps more concerningly for the Tesla chief, the likely next chancellor of Germany, Freidrich Merz, who now leads the formerly Merkel-run Christian Democratic Union, has suggested that American entrepreneur’s companies may face “legal” repercussions following this week’s elections.

“What happened in this election campaign cannot go unchallenged,” Merz told the Wall Street Journal last week, adding: “It can be a political response. It can be a legal response. I want to analyze this calmly after this election campaign.”

Despite attempting to put himself forward as a conservative candidate, the CDU leader has proudly defended Germany’s censorship regime. Mimicking the left-wing position at the Munich Security Conference, Merz said: “We respect the elections in the United States and expect the same in return. We abide by the rules of our democratic institutions. Freedom of speech remains freedom of speech, but fake news, hate speech, and crimes are subject to legal restrictions and independent courts.”

The comments came in response to a speech from U.S. Vice President JD Vance on Friday, in which Trump’s deputy chastised European nations, including Germany, for failing to live up to foundational Western principles such as freedom of expression.

While the political establishment in Berlin reacted with histrionics to Vance’s critiques, he was shortly vindicated as American broadcaster CBS aired footage of pre-dawn armed police raids in Germany over a supposedly “racist” meme posted on the internet.

Local prosecutors explained that posting “lies”, “malicious gossip”, and even re-posting so-called fake news could lead to jail time in the supposedly democratic nation.

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