German Government 'Has a Problem With Critically-Minded Citizens'

Head of the German party "Alternative for Germany" (AfD) Frauke Petry criticized what she views as a contradictory understanding of freedom of speech demonstrated by the German government.

Following the meeting of leaders of the European Parliament's faction "Europe and Freedom Nations" (ENF) in Koblenz, Petry told journalists that the German government can't deal with people who have an alternative opinion.

According to Petri, people whose opinion differs from that of the majority are "immediately labeled as anti-democratic."

"We see that the government is clearly having a problem with freedom of speech and that it can hardly deal with critically-minded citizens," Petri said.

Earlier, it was reported that German Facebook will trial a fake news filtering system for German users of the site, allowing individuals to fact-check and report stories they suspect to be untrue.

Such stories are expected to be dispatched to Correctiv, a German fact-checking organization. If Correctiv determines the story to be fake, it will be marked as false and users seeing it in their feeds will be warned about its doubted authenticity. It will also be blocked from being promoted in users' feeds.

However, Petri believes that the new initiative is aimed not at fact-checking potentially fake stories, but at establishing a supervisory authority that will try to get rid of certain undesirable content.

The politician argued that it will be about a "new censorship authority which will impose fines on creators of the so-called fake web news in the Internet."