When Anas Modamani found out that the internet had labeled him a terrorist, he was visiting his cousin in eastern Germany. It was a few days before Modamani’s 19th birthday, in March of last year, and the trip was supposed to be a respite from language classes and long waits at the refugee center in Berlin—the usual rhythm of life since Modamani had immigrated from Syria seven months earlier. But when he logged into Facebook, he saw that a friend had sent him a disturbing message. Two days earlier, a series of bombings around Brussels had killed dozens of people. The message from Modamani’s friend linked to what appeared to be a news story about the attack, illustrated by a police snapshot of one of the suicide bombers—a baby-faced young Belgian man named Najim Laachraoui. Next to that photo was a picture of Modamani—a selfie snapped six months prior, with him posed next to the German chancellor Angela Merkel.
Someone — maybe in Moldova, maybe Hungary — had decided that the two men were one and the same, and spliced the pictures together. Though their resemblance was remote, the misidentification spread to Facebook and began to be shared by hundreds of people. Soon, for the purposes of the web, Modamani was a terrorist.
At first, he didn’t know what to do. “We said, ‘This is a joke, and no reason to worry,’” his cousin, Yamen Madamani, told me (they have the same last name in Arabic, but use different transliterations). “But after a while, the photo was everywhere.”
Shaken, Modamani called Anke Meeuw, the German woman with whom he was living. She told him to stay inside the house. The town he was visiting was known for its neo-Nazi scene, and he was afraid of being identified on the street. He was also worried that his family would find out what was happening. As it turned out, his mother, back in Syria, had already seen the stories. She read online that he’d been thrown in prison; he spoke with her on Skype to assure her it wasn’t true. He told me that he cried.
The next day, Modamani began a self-designed campaign to counter the false information about him. From his cousin’s house, he wrote a Facebook post calling the rumors “treacherous and shameless.” A friend in Berlin posted a video of him reading a statement in halting German. “I am very sad,” he repeats into the camera, visibly upset. “I want to live in peace and have a good future.”
In the weeks that followed, Modamani began writing to the strangers who had shared the stories with his photo, translating his messages from Arabic to German using Google translate. He asked them to take down their posts. He sent them photos of his life, trying to convince them he was just a normal teenager. Most of the time, they didn’t respond.
For months, he received hateful notes on Facebook. “You Arabs are cowardly, lazy, and can only live on the dime of other people,” a student from Hamburg wrote to him. Away from his computer, Modamani was constantly afraid of being recognized. Once, three men approached him on the street, demanding to know whether he was the person in the photo. He fled before finding out what they wanted.
Complaining to Facebook was like trying to contain an epidemic with a Band-Aid—even if Facebook removed a post, a new link would pop up, and people would share it. For a few months, Modamani left Facebook to try to focus on German language exams. His friends still teased him, jokingly calling him “the terrorist.” But it seemed like things were getting better.
Then, around Christmas last year, it started happening again. This time, his picture was displayed as the culprit behind a truck rampage on a Berlin Christmas market, and a separate attempt to light a homeless man on fire in a subway station. For Modamani, this signaled a dangerous new shift. Political conservatives are more likely to share and believe certain kinds of false information online than liberals, and with the German elections approaching, Modamani knew that his position as a refugee was likely to make him a target for fake clickbait. He resolved to put an end to the onslaught.
Turning again to Meeuw for help, Modamani sought legal advice. They reached out to Austrian organization that fights fake news online. Though Modamani didn’t know it at the time, a lawyer across the country, in Bavaria, had been looking for a case just like his.
But the lawyer, Chan-jo Jun, didn’t just want to make a few fake posts disappear — he wanted to hold someone accountable for the erosion of civic discourse. Jun had already been pursuing Facebook for months, submitting criminal complaints to prosecutors’ offices throughout Germany. He wanted the biggest social media network in the world to take responsibility for its role in upholding German laws on free speech, which are broader than their American counterparts. He wanted to take Facebook to court.
For Jun, Modamani represented the intersection of multiple real-time social crises: fake news on Facebook, ideological extremism, and the debate about how to settle the refugees entering Germany. By the time Modamani and Jun met in person, Jun was already convinced they had a nearly airtight case. He had tried to fight Facebook before; perhaps, with the help of a young refugee falsely accused of murder, they could change the way people talk about things online.
Jun and Modamani’s case was based on one photo, taken in September 2015, in a refugee center outside of Berlin. The photo shows Modamani posing for a selfie with Merkel during her visit to the center. He’d snapped it just three days after he’d arrived at the center. At the time, he didn’t even know exactly who Merkel was — he saw a crowd of cameras as he was leaving to do some shopping, and thought it would be fun to get a photograph with an important person.
While the pair posed, photographers documenting Merkel’s trip captured the moment and published it on the wires. That alone made Modamani semi-famous. He was invited to German talk shows and held up as a model refugee, someone with a commitment to learning the language and who was developing intimacy with his host family—proof that cultural integration of the refugees sweeping into the country could work. In an uncertain time, Modamani was a symbol of hope and reassurance. That period was, he told me, the best of his life.
But if the selfie so easily symbolized Merkel’s optimistic stance on refugees, it was also swiftly weaponized. Now, Facebook memes try to accuse the chancellor of naïveté, suggesting she is posing next to a threat that she fails to identify. “People say these postings are about Anas, but that’s actually not correct; they’re about Merkel and her refugee politics,” Jürgen Ney, a friend of Modamani who lives in Berlin, told me.
Within Germany, Facebook has geo-blocked many of the posts, meaning that the Facebook users who can be located — by their IP addresses, for example — as being inside the country can’t see them. But Jun has argued that the content is still accessible via a direct URL, or by using a proxy IP address or a Tor browser. Christian Solmecke, a lawyer who has worked with Jun in prior cases against the social media giant, told me over email that dozens of illegal hate comments and defamatory posts reported to Facebook have been allowed to remain under the premise that they don’t violate the social media company’s community standards.
At least one of the memes, blaming Modamani for setting a homeless man on fire, was available on the Facebook profile of a German politician (from which it was shared 940 times) at the time of publication. Jun wanted Facebook to remove every instance of the defamatory post, whether the specific URL had been reported or not. He sought a preliminary injunction— an emergency measure that would force Facebook to act immediately to remove all the posts. It was the first time formal action was being taken against the social media giant in Germany to make Facebook at least partially responsible for fake news on its site.
At the first hearing on the injunction, in February, Martin Munz, a lawyer from White & Case representing Facebook, said it was technically impossible for Facebook to find all the instances of the posts. (Munz did not respond to interview requests, and a Facebook spokesperson told me: “We are sorry to hear about Mr. Modamani’s concerns with the way some people have used his image […] We have already quickly disabled access to content that has been accurately reported to us by Mr. Modamani’s legal representatives, so we do not believe that legal action here is necessary or that it is the most effective way to resolve the situation.”)
Munz explained to the judge that Facebook could not identify the pictures among the billions of posts generated by its 1.86 billion users. It did not, he said, have such a “wundermaschine.”
Wonder machines or not, the social media giant is worried about becoming the arbiter of truth. Facebook has community standards that ban bullying and hate speech, but recourse within the site for defamation or false information is currently more limited. One of the reasons for that is because fake news often occupies a gray area between libel, falsehood, rumor, and opinion — making it difficult to identify. This has angered critics, who argue that Facebook does have tools for removing things like copyright infringement and boobs—it just chooses not to extend them to topics like Holocaust denial, which is illegal in Germany.
In January, Facebook said it would expand a fact-checking initiative launched after the US elections to Germany. The beta tests underway allow Facebook users to flag content they think is fake, which will then be checked by a team of journalists — in Germany, by a non-profit organization called Correctiv. If a post doesn’t check out, it will be flagged with notice informing people on the platform that the information it contains is disputed.
That is unlikely to pacify Jun, who has been crusading against Facebook since long before he met Modamani. A lawyer with his own practice specializing in technology litigation in the small, Rococo-inflected Bavarian town of Würzburg, Jun has already become a minor celebrity for bringing criminal complaints against Mark Zuckerberg and other top managers at Facebook to prosecutors in Hamburg and Munich; in the latter, the prosecutor’s office opened a formal investigation that is ongoing. However, having exhausted the ability to fight Facebook criminally, he was on the hunt for a different sort of case—a civil suit that would address some of the issues that concerned him the most.
Jun’s campaign against the social media giant began mostly by accident, when he read about hate posts and defamatory speech on the site in the press and thought to himself that there must be a simple, legal solution. He would give formal notice about the problem, then write a short blog post for his website with a template for others to use to take down similar illegal content. “That was extremely naïve,” Jun told me in his glass-walled office, perched on a hill overlooking the Main river valley.
Instead, he found Facebook (and its European subsidiary, Facebook Ireland Limited) unresponsive to his demands and, he believed, in violation of German laws. As the months passed, he became increasingly annoyed with Facebook’s rebuffs, while simultaneously becoming enlivened by what he saw as its bald-faced hubris. He began making sure colleagues were on hand to act as witnesses when he put in calls to Facebook or its lawyers; he wrote everything down to send documentation to the prosecutor’s office. He forwarded the emails and notices he wrote, and those he received, to reporters at Germany’s top newspapers and magazines.
The child of South Korean migrants, Jun graduated at the top of his law class in Bavaria and worked briefly for McKinsey & Company before starting his own firm. He has achieved a level of success that affords him the financial freedom to pursue issues that move him. When he was approached by the Austrian anti-fake news organization Mimikama about Modamani’s case, he immediately thought he saw a fight destined for the courts. Though there was no question about whether Modamani was a terrorist, or whether he had attacked a homeless man, the accusations against him had resurfaced repeatedly. “Usually, legal cases are complicated. Here, we can tell the entire story in two sentences,” Jun told me. But the political nature of the matter posed its own challenges.
Since taking on Modamani’s case, Jun has become the latest target of right-wing groups (Meeuw, Modamani’s German host mother, has also had threats phoned into her office). Jun has received hate mail, and, shortly before he was set to appear in court with Modamani, he was called by someone who threatened his family.
For Jun, the fight against Facebook is an existential battle: He feels that the entire European value system is being subsumed by a global corporation that is developing its own moral code and does not answer to anybody. But for many others, he told me, “they just hate the fact that I’m helping a refugee.”
If there is such a thing as a typical refugee experience, Modamani has not had it. His family left the Damascus suburb of Darayya after it was ripped apart by conflict, and he left Syria at his mother’s urging when he graduated from high school — in part to avoid joining Bashar al-Assad’s army. It took him three tries to cross the Aegean Sea (on the final attempt, the boat he was on capsized), and he crossed the border into Macedonia on foot over the mountains.
Extraordinary as his flight was, it was described to me repeatedly by friends and acquaintances as characteristic — he was one of hundreds of thousands who made a similar trek. But when Modamani took the selfie with Merkel, just weeks after he arrived, he was propelled into a media glare few people experience. He felt lucky. “I had never in my life met an important politician,” he told me, adding slyly, “in Syria, no one would want to take a selfie with al-Assad.”
Modamani has knack for switching seamlessly between devil-may-care lightheartedness and intense resolve, though he occasionally gives off an air of teenage distraction. He splits his days between German classes, his work at a local McDonald’s, and media appearances. Nailing down a meeting time with him sometimes proved difficult, in part due to last-minute changes to his shift schedule at the restaurant — we finally met in the outlying Berlin neighborhood of Lichtenberg, in the former east, where monumental socialist architecture gives way to residential high-rises, and where Modamani works.
After the original photograph of his selfie with Merkel was published, Modamani was inundated with friend requests on Facebook and messages offering help and companionship. Modamani told me that during that time, he was meeting up with people nearly every day who had seen his photo with Merkel. Pale and crested by a mop of dark hair, Modamani — whose height and good looks lend him the air of a Bollywood star — has the kind of confidence derived from a deep familiarity with adversity. This, coupled with his jokester’s cheerfulness and a palpable desire to be an upstanding person, has earned him a broad and real social network. He has more than one house where he is welcome to stay in Berlin, though he spends most of his time with Meeuw and her family, whom he found through Facebook when he was looking to escape the refugee camp to which he was assigned. (Meeuw wrote on the site a few months after he moved in that it was “great for my daughter to have a big brother; how diligent and ambitiously he learns and wants to improve constantly; how wonderful it is to get such a ‘son.’”)
If Modamani became an unlikely protagonist, he is surprisingly suited to the task. During the first hearing against Facebook, Modamani sat quietly through the proceedings, shoulders held tightly in his button-up shirt while Munz, the Facebook lawyer, and Jun sparred with each other with ersatz collegiality. But after the proceedings ended, he walked outside the courthouse and spoke to dozens of journalists. Undeterred by his imperfect German or by the cameras pushing to get the shot, Modamani launched into a forceful defense of his cause, and of himself. “People sit at home, they use Facebook, and they don’t know the background. They write what they want, but what they write isn’t true. These are lies. I am a good man,” he said.
On his own Facebook profile, Modamani cultivates a persona that recalls an inspirational speaker, advising optimism and plying his own experience for messages of resilience. “I will sail against strong wind and break the waves on stormy seas,” he wrote recently in German and Arabic, above a photograph of himself at a waterfront gazing into the far distance. But his posts are often marked with mournfulness. Modamani misses his home, and shares photos of its destruction. Sometimes, he deletes his entire account for a few days in order to clear his head.
Sitting at a Chinese buffet in Berlin (his favorite restaurant, for its endlessness), he told me that the past year and a half have profoundly changed his perception of his adopted country. “I haven’t lived in Germany for very long. I am still learning about the country. But for me, in my life, I have found no peace here.”
It has been a year and a half since Modamani’s photo with Merkel was first published, and he has seen himself be twice reinvented, his identity hijacked and catapulted into spheres of interpretations beyond his control. He never wanted to be a refugee. He certainly never expected to be called a terrorist.
On Tuesday, the Würzburg court rejected Modamani’s request for a temporary injunction. The judge — who admitted to not having a Facebook account — said that because Facebook did not publish or interact with the fake memes, the site could not be considered either “a perpetrator or a participant” in the slander. He added that — since current law does not apply to internet platforms like Facebook the way it does to publishing entities — Facebook could only be expected to actively find illegal posts if it were technically possible to do so. Neither Facebook’s lawyers nor Modamani travelled to Würzburg to hear the verdict in person.
But, following Tuesday’s decision, Jun said he would no longer work on the case. He based his decision in large part on the threats that have been made against him and his family. Even if Modamani decides not to appeal, Jun said that the extensive media attention that has effectively cleared his name is not likely to be afforded to the next such case. Weeks earlier, Jun told me that regardless of the outcome, he believes he’s won part of this battle: “Anas has really suffered; he was afraid to go out on the street. I think he has already reached one of his goals: to not be seen as a terrorist anymore.”
The way information behaves on Facebook, though, only amplifies an underlying problem — the way people create their beliefs in the first place. Many people circulating the memes that hosted Modamani’s image knowingly ignored flags that something in the story was amiss. Often, they said the story proved their point even if it was incorrect. In other words, it was irrelevant if the information upon which they based their opinions was related to reality — like a house of mirrors, they saw reflections of their own perspective no matter where they looked.
After we met in Lichtenberg, Modamani and I took a walk through Berlin’s airy central square. As Modamani strolled through department stores, he pointed out the shop where he bought the shirt that he wore on the first and only day he appeared in court. In some ways, Modamani’s case against Facebook allowed him to fight the narratives in which, by virtue of real bombs and virtual hatred, he found himself entwined. “I am a refugee, a poor person, and I have brought Facebook to court,” he told me. For him, a single person caught in a web of falsehoods, that almost seemed like enough.
Art direction by Robert Shaw.
