Federal Minister of Justice Stefanie Hubig (SPD) has spoken out against a real name requirement on the Internet. “Anyone who wants to express their own opinions or experiences anonymously or under a pseudonym is not accountable for it,” she told the Daily Mirror.
However, the “legitimate interest in permanent anonymity” ends “where crimes are committed,” said Hubig. It is therefore important that criminal statements on the Internet are tracked and perpetrators can be held accountable. But there is no need for a real name requirement. If the Identity of criminals determined retrospectively can be done, that is sufficient. Hubig said that the Basic Law also protects controversial opinions and polemical escalation.
Previously, among others, Bavaria’s Digital Minister Fabian Mehring (Free Voters) and the former President of the Federal Constitutional Court, Andreas Voßkuhle, pronounced for such a duty. This would require changes at the federal level.
Voßkuhle believes that the requirement to use a real name is constitutionally permissible
Mehring had said that the right to freedom of expression does not imply any entitlement anonymity. “You have to stand by your statements; analogue and digital.” What is criminal at the regulars’ table must also be punishable online. In his opinion, a real name requirement on social media could civilize the online discourse culture. Anyone who knows that their actions will not have consequences behaves more responsibly.
Voßkuhle had made a similar argument and explained that he considered such an obligation to be “not entirely easy,” but that it was “constitutionally permissible.”
The justice ministers of North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony, Benjamin Limbach (Greens) and Kathrin Wahlmann (SPD), also speak in the Daily Mirror against such a real name requirement. Limbach said that such an obligation was technically easy to circumvent, but “politically extremely dangerous because it sows distrust and restricts freedom of expression.”
