The German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) is hearing a lawsuit brought by Green Party politician Renate Künast against Facebook parent company Meta over whether platform operators must actively track down and delete duplicate, unauthorized memes containing fabricated quotes. Today, the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe is holding a new hearing in this legal dispute, marking a crucial point in a protracted process that raises questions about how effectively personality rights can be protected in the digital space against the sheer mass of content.
The 2015 Fabricated Quote Sparking the Legal Battle
The dispute centers on a digital image-and-text combination that surfaced on Facebook in 2015. The post featured a photograph of Renate Künast alongside an entirely fabricated statement reading, “Integration starts with you, as a German, learning Turkish!” This supposed quote was entirely made up—an instance of false information that appears in unmanageable numbers on Facebook and other social networks to disparage a person or put them in a bad light.
Künast reported the original meme to Facebook, prompting the platform to remove that specific post. However, the manipulated image quickly resurfaced in numerous slight variations, frequently accompanied by additional insults directed at the politician.
Meta Argument Versus Plaintiff Demands
Following the re-emergence of the modified posts, Künast sued Meta. She demands that the tech giant must not only delete the initial misinformation but also track down and purge all semantically identical variations of the post.
Meta counters that Facebook is only required to delete specific false quotes flagged by users. The company argues that searching for individual posts through manual staff review requires checking content for its underlying meaning, an obligation that hosting providers do not shoulder.
The European Court of Justice Precedent
Lower courts largely ruled in favor of Künast. The Federal Court of Justice, acting as the highest civil court, paused its proceedings to wait for a ruling from the European Court of Justice.
That ruling arrived in December 2025. The ECJ decided in a separate case that platform operators must take appropriate measures to prevent illegally distributed content from being easily copied and published on other web pages. The Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe is now evaluating what legal consequences this European ruling holds for Renate Künast’s ongoing case against Meta.
