Hounded over Merkel selfie, Syrian refugee sues Facebook

A Syrian refugee whose selfie with German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been repeatedly manipulated to link him to violent jihad will take Facebook to court for spreading defamatory fake news.

Anas Modamani, 19, argues the US social media giant has failed to take down doctored images that have falsely linked him to, among other things, deadly Islamist attacks in Brussels and Berlin last year.

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In the case set to start yesterday in the central city of Wurzburg, he will seek an injunction against Facebook Ireland Limited, the group's European subsidiary, to take down another montage.

That posting wrongfully claims Modamani was among a group of Berlin juvenile delinquents who tried to set fire to a homeless man in a case that sparked public outrage last Christmas.

Modamani is represented by German lawyer Chan-jo Jun, who has separately launched criminal complaints against Facebook for inciting hatred.

Jun argues that Facebook acts as "a content provider, a journalistic medium, which through its guidelines, algorithms and journalist-bots influences which content people see and how".

"Facebook must finally follow German law ... to remove illegal content," he said, arguing that the company's own community standards did not prevent defamatory and insulting statements.

Modamani arrived in Germany in 2015, along with tens of thousands of other Syrians.

When Merkel visited his Berlin refugee shelter in September that year, he took two selfie images with her in jubilant scenes also captured by a news agency photographer.

Since then, those images have been manipulated and used in different contexts countless times, at a time when right-wing fury has flared online against Merkel's liberal stance on refugees.

Trolls have cut and pasted Modamani's picture into wanted posters and on fake news reports, typically alleging that the refugee made famous by the Merkel selfie had turned out to be a terrorist.