The founder of free speech platform Gab has shared a letter from the German government asking the social media site to give up the identity of a user who called an obese female politician fat.
CEO Andrew Torba posted the correspondence from the Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany (BKA) on X on Saturday, informing his followers that Gab had refused to cooperate.
“One of the more ridiculous foreign data requests that Gab received (and turned down) from Germany was when they wanted us to dox a user for calling a female politician fat,” Mr Torba wrote.
He then shared a photo of the far left Greens co-leader and member of German parliament Ricarda Lang, 30, who is overweight and “bisexual”.
This is the politician in question btw pic.twitter.com/M8xWZaPgIc
— Andrew Torba (@BasedTorba) August 24, 2024
The letter states: “In this particular case the Gab user ‘@Die_Lunte_brennt_schon’ published two posts that sexualize the German politician ‘Ricarda Lang’ and denigrate her weight.
“Through the sexualized and denigrated representation of ‘Ricarda Lang’, the user attacks the politician and shows his own disrespect (section 185 of the German criminal code). With this insult the user publicly insults a person in the political life on the grounds of the insulted person’s position in the public life.”
The BKA goes on to state that since the posts are written in German and the user speaks Germany, that the is believed to currently live in Germany, and requests their “real identity and current location”.
The letter then requests the user’s account ID, registration date/time and IP address, account status, full name, date of birth, display names, email addresses, usernames, phones numbers, postal addresses, payment methods and copies of ID documents.
X users responded to the letter with disbelief, with one asking: “Who the heck is actually running Germany… the KGB?”
“Thanks for the transparency and for declining the request! Our government is a disgrace,” said independent German politician Joana Cotar.
“We see that some East German habits die hard,” read another popular comment.
Mr Torba also spoke out in defence of free speech after the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in France on Saturday for allegedly failing to moderate his platform.
“This is why I no longer travel outside the US,” he wrote in response.
“The only two things keeping Elon and I out of jail are the First Amendment and Section 230, both of which have been under siege in recent years by the current Regime. I’ve been mentally and spiritually preparing for this scenario for many years now,” he said in another post.
Earlier this month Mr Torba accused other social media companies of handing over user data to governments in response to a video of British police arresting a woman for allegedly taking part in anti- immigration protests.
“They are finding these people because social media companies are handing the government the data,” Mr Torba wrote on X.
“I say again: if the UK wants data on UK Gab users they’ll have to invade Pennsylvania with tanks to try and get it.”
