BGH Refers Facebook False Quote Meme Case to the CJEU (VI ZR 64/24)

Germany's BGH Stays the Facebook False Quote Meme Case and Refers Six Questions to the CJEU

On October 27, 2026 Germany's Bundesgerichtshof stayed VI ZR 64/24, a suit by a member of the Bundestag over false quote memes on Facebook, and referred six questions on platform liability to the Court of Justice of the European Union. Nothing was decided on the merits.

Information last verified on October 29, 2026. This is a developing story; we update it as the record changes.

Status: Order (Beschluss) entered October 27, 2026 in VI ZR 64/24. The proceedings are stayed, six questions of EU law are now pending in Luxembourg, and neither the Bundesgerichtshof nor the Court of Justice has decided whether Facebook is liable, as of October 29, 2026. The full written order had still not been published by the court as of that date.

Jurisdiction scope: This article covers a reference from the German Bundesgerichtshof to the Court of Justice of the European Union concerning a social network operator's obligations under German civil law, the GDPR, the E-Commerce Directive and the Digital Services Act. It does not address United States platform immunity under 47 U.S.C. § 230 or any non-EU regime. For the national rules in the background, see how German defamation law splits civil and criminal remedies.

What Happened

The VI. Zivilsenat of the Bundesgerichtshof heard cross-appeals in VI ZR 64/24 on the morning of October 27, 2026 and, instead of giving judgment, stayed the case and sent six questions to Luxembourg. The court announced the order the same day in press release No. 204/2026.

"Nach ausführlicher Erörterung in der mündlichen Verhandlung hat der VI. Zivilsenat das Verfahren ausgesetzt und dem Gerichtshof der Europäischen Union zur Auslegung des Unionsrechts folgende Fragen zur Vorabentscheidung vorgelegt:" Source: Bundesgerichtshof, Pressemitteilung Nr. 204/2026 of October 27, 2026, on the order (Beschluss) of October 27, 2026 in VI ZR 64/24. In English: after detailed discussion at the oral hearing, the VI. Zivilsenat stayed the proceedings and referred the following questions on the interpretation of EU law to the Court of Justice of the European Union for a preliminary ruling.

Two points follow from that single sentence and both matter more than the headline. First, the Senate reached no view on the merits that it was willing to publish. Second, the vehicle is Article 267 preliminary-reference procedure, which, as the Court of Justice states in its own notes on such references, lets a national court ask about the interpretation of EU law while the Court of Justice does not decide the dispute itself.

The lower courts were the Landgericht Frankfurt am Main (Regional Court), which decided on April 8, 2022 in 2-03 O 188/21, and the Oberlandesgericht Frankfurt am Main (Higher Regional Court), which decided on January 25, 2024 in 16 U 65/22. As of October 29, 2026 the written text of the referral order was not available: the file the court serves at the decision's own URL is a standing notice from the Bundesgerichtshof's Entscheidungsversand saying the decision is not yet printed and that no further information about it exists, including at the press office. Until that order issues, press release No. 204/2026 is the authoritative account of what was referred.

The Six Questions Referred to Luxembourg

The release sets out exactly six questions. The first three share one long description of the defendant: a platform for a social network that serves the exchange of opinions and information among its users and confines itself to storing user-generated information and making it accessible to other users, without having taken notice of the content beforehand and without any editorial content review. What follows is this desk's faithful English rendering of the German; the article numbers are the ones the court gives.

1. Is the operator of such a platform responsible without restriction under data protection law, that is, a controller within the meaning of Article 4 No. 7 of the GDPR?
2. Does such an operator benefit from the liability privileges in Articles 12 to 15 of Directive 2000/31/EC (the E-Commerce Directive)? And does it defeat classification as a hosting service that the operator curates user-provided information by algorithm, going beyond mere categorisation and indexing for better accessibility, in particular by deliberately selecting, ordering, presenting or recommending it, even though automation means the operator never learns what the information says?
3. On what conditions does such a platform fall within the concept of a hosting service in Article 3(g)(iii) and (i) and Article 6 of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 (the Digital Services Act)? The same algorithmic-curation sub-question is repeated here.
4. Does Article 15 of the E-Commerce Directive preclude an obligation on a platform operator to assess content that is possibly sense-identical to content already declared unlawful not only by automated techniques, checking for slightly different wording and similarly minor deviations without regard to context, but independently and manually as to its content, in particular to determine for itself the meaning of the potentially sense-identical content?
5. The same question as 4, but asked about Article 8 of the Digital Services Act.
6. Does the liability privilege under Article 14(1) of the E-Commerce Directive and/or Article 6(1) of the Digital Services Act apply to a claim under Article 82 of the GDPR?

One caution on question 3. The press release compresses the citation as "Art. 3 Buchst. g) iii), i), Art. 6 der Verordnung (EU) 2022/2065". The long form of those provision references should be read from the written order when it is published rather than from this summary.

The Meme Case Behind the Referral

The facts come from the court's hearing notice, press release No. 199/2026 of October 22, 2026. The claimant is a politician and a member of the Bundestag; the court does not name her, and neither do we. The defendant operates Facebook.

A meme circulated on the network carrying her photograph, her first and last name, her party's name and a sentence she never uttered: "Integration fängt damit an, dass sie als Deutscher mal türkisch lernen." The court states flatly that she never made the statement: "Diese Aussage hat die Klägerin nie getätigt." The meme spread through uploads and the share function, appearing under different URLs and in different variants. Some copies carried a caption, which a user can use to comment on the image or to distance themselves from it, for instance by labelling it a false quotation. In the examples the claimant put before the court, the captions were mostly abuse directed at her.

The technical finding at the centre of the case is this:

"Die Sinndeutung insbesondere von Memes mit Captions danach, ob sie mit dem Ausgangs-Meme sinngleich sind ... lässt sich nicht in einem rein automatisierten Verfahren vornehmen." Source: Bundesgerichtshof, Pressemitteilung Nr. 199/2026 of October 22, 2026. In English: working out whether a meme, especially one with a caption, is sense-identical to the original meme cannot be done by a purely automated process.

In other words, similar memes can be found automatically, but deciding whether a given copy still conveys the false quotation requires a human to read it.

The claimant gave the defendant the specific storage locations (URLs) for the original meme and eight further sense-identical memes and proved the quotation was false. The defendant removed those nine over time, and they are no longer part of the action. What remains is the claimant's position that she is entitled to an injunction covering every meme on Facebook, up to the point the judgment becomes final, that is identical or sense-identical to the original, without her having to supply the URLs. Alongside the injunction she claimed at least EUR 10,000 in non-material damages. The defendant's position is that as a neutral hosting provider it need only remove specifically identified posts and is under no duty to search its platform for further posts that infringe personality rights.

The Landgericht granted the claim in full. On the defendant's appeal, the Oberlandesgericht dismissed the non-material damages claim but upheld the injunction. The defendant then appealed on points of law seeking complete dismissal, and the claimant cross-appealed to have the first-instance judgment restored. Both appeals were live when the Senate stayed the case.

Why the Case Was Stayed Twice

This is the second stay. Press release No. 199/2026 records that the lower courts and the parties had all proceeded on the basis that German law governed, specifically § 1004 Abs. 1 Satz 2 and § 823 Abs. 1 BGB. The Senate then put the parties on notice that the claims might instead rest on Articles 17 and 82 of the GDPR, and raised what significance the Digital Services Act, in particular Article 6(4) and Article 8 DSA, has in that context.

After an earlier oral hearing on February 18, 2025, the Senate stayed the proceedings to await the Court of Justice's decision in Case C-492/23. The Court of Justice gave that judgment on December 2, 2025, in Russmedia Digital and Inform Media Press. According to the Court's own press release No. 150/25, the Court held that the operator of an online marketplace is a controller within the meaning of Article 4(7) of the GDPR of the personal data contained in advertisements published on its marketplace, because an advertisement placed by a user reaches the public only through the marketplace, and that such an operator cannot escape its GDPR obligations by relying on the liability exemption in Directive 2000/31. The figure at first instance in that Romanian case was EUR 7,000 in non-material damage.

Russmedia therefore answered part of what the Senate wanted to know and, on the evidence of the new referral, opened the rest. A marketplace that the Court told to screen advertisements before publication, free or paid, is not obviously the same thing as a social network that stores and serves whatever its users post, and Russmedia concerned pre-publication obligations for sensitive data rather than the scope of an injunction against reworded reposts. Hence the three questions that restate the defendant's role at length, and hence question 6, which asks whether the hosting privilege reaches an Article 82 damages claim at all.

What the Law Actually Says

Two provisions of the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch carried this case through two instances. Under § 1004 Abs. 1 BGB, where property is interfered with other than by dispossession, the owner may demand removal of the interference, and where further interference is to be feared, may sue for an injunction. German courts have long applied that second sentence by analogy to personality rights, which is why the claimant's removal and injunction claims were pleaded on it. Under § 823 Abs. 1 BGB, a person who unlawfully injures the life, body, health, freedom, property or any other right of another, intentionally or negligently, must compensate the resulting damage. The general right of personality sits in that final category, "ein sonstiges Recht".

A false quotation can also be a crime in Germany, which is a separate track from the civil claims in this case. Under § 186 StGB (Üble Nachrede) it is an offence to assert or disseminate a fact about another that is capable of making them contemptible or lowering them in public opinion, unless the fact is demonstrably true, with the maximum rising from one year to two where the act is committed publicly, in a meeting or by disseminating content. Under § 187 StGB (Verleumdung) the offence is asserting or disseminating an untrue fact of that kind against better knowledge, which carries up to two years, rising to five where it is done publicly, in a meeting or by dissemination. Our explainers on the not demonstrably true rule in § 186 StGB and on knowingly false statements under § 187 StGB walk through both.

The EU layer is where the referral bites. Articles 12 to 15 of Directive 2000/31/EC set out when an information society service provider cannot be held liable for what it transmits or stores, and Article 15 bars Member States from imposing a general obligation to monitor. Article 6 of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065, the Digital Services Act, now carries the hosting rule, and Article 8 DSA states that no general obligation to monitor stored or transmitted information, or to actively seek out facts indicating illegal activity, may be imposed on intermediaries. Article 6(4) DSA preserves the power of a judicial or administrative authority to require a provider to terminate or prevent an infringement. Press release No. 199/2026 reprints the two BGB provisions, Articles 17 and 82 of the GDPR and Articles 6 and 8 of the Digital Services Act; it does not reprint any text of the E-Commerce Directive. Because EUR-Lex and the Court of Justice's own case database both return an empty response to automated requests from our systems, we describe the effect of these EU provisions rather than quote them, relying on the German court's reproduction for the GDPR and DSA articles and, for the E-Commerce Directive, on the Court of Justice's own summary of it in press release No. 128/19.

On the sense-identical question there is already a Court of Justice ruling in the background. In Case C-18/18, Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek v Facebook Ireland Limited, decided October 3, 2019, the Court held that the E-Commerce Directive does not preclude a national court from ordering a host provider to remove or block information identical to information already declared unlawful, and also content that is equivalent to it, subject to limits. According to the Court's press release No. 128/19, the equivalent-content limb applies provided that the monitoring and searching are confined to information conveying a message whose content remains essentially unchanged compared with the content that gave rise to the finding of illegality and that contains the elements specified in the injunction, and provided that the differences in wording "are not such as to require the host provider to carry out an independent assessment of that content (thus, the host provider may have recourse to automated search tools and technologies)". Both of the Court's press releases we relied on carry the standard note that they are unofficial documents for media use and are not binding on the Court.

Put that proviso next to the court's account of the record. Glawischnig-Piesczek tolerated an equivalent-content injunction on the footing that automated tools could do the work. The Bundesgerichtshof's own hearing notice records that for memes with captions, automation cannot do the work. Questions 4 and 5 ask what happens when that assumption fails.

Analysis: Why This Matters

The following is analysis from the Recording Law Editorial Team.

Germany is not being asked whether a platform must act on a notice. That part is settled: a platform told about specific unlawful content, at specific URLs, with proof, has to deal with it, and the defendant in this case did, removing all nine memes the claimant identified. The referral is about the next increment, and it is a large one. If a claimant must produce a URL for every reworded copy of the same fabricated quotation, the burden of policing a viral meme sits with the person the meme is about, who has to find each variant as it appears. If the platform must find them, someone has to read captions and judge meaning, because the court's own account of the case records that no purely automated process can do it.

That is why questions 2 and 3 are, in practical terms, the ones with the widest reach. They ask whether a social network that algorithmically selects, orders, presents and recommends user posts is still doing the passive storing that the hosting privilege was written for, even though automation means it never knows what any individual post says. A ruling that recommendation defeats hosting status would unsettle far more than false quote memes; a ruling that it does not would confirm the privilege for the ranked feed as it is actually built. We are not going to guess which way Luxembourg goes, and nobody reading a press release should.

Question 6 is the quietest and may be the most consequential for claimants. The remedies in this case split: the Oberlandesgericht upheld the injunction and dismissed the damages claim. If the hosting privilege does not travel to an Article 82 GDPR claim, the damages route becomes materially more attractive than the German tort route for exactly this kind of case, and that is the route the Senate flagged to the parties in the first place when it pointed them at Articles 17 and 82 of the GDPR. Russmedia already held that the Directive 2000/31 exemption cannot be used to escape GDPR obligations; question 6 asks whether that extends to the damages remedy itself.

Finally, the timetable is a fact readers should hold on to. References of this kind are not quick, and this case demonstrates it from its own record: the Senate stayed it in February 2025 to await Case C-492/23 and that wait ran to December 2, 2025, after which the case had to be argued again before being referred in its own right. Nothing in the available record indicates when the Court of Justice will answer the six questions put on October 27, 2026. Readers following German platform disputes may also be interested in the BGH's recent treatment of SCHUFA score disclosure claims, decided by a different Senate of the same court and also working through GDPR remedies.

How This Affects You

Nothing changes today for anyone dealing with a false quotation on a German platform. The law that applies while the reference is pending is the law as it stood on October 26, 2026, and the practical steps are the ones that were already available: identify the specific content and its URL, document that the statement is false, and notify the platform, because a notice that identifies unlawful content is what triggers a host's duty to act. Where the statement is a fabricated factual assertion rather than an opinion, the criminal provisions in §§ 186 and 187 StGB may also be in play, and German data protection law supplies a parallel set of rights, which our overview of the DSGVO and the BDSG sets out.

What the reference does change is the horizon. Any German injunction that currently reaches "identical or sense-identical" content rests on reasoning the Court of Justice has now been asked to review, and the same is true of arguments that a platform's recommendation systems forfeit the hosting privilege. Nobody should assume a settled answer in either direction before the ruling arrives.

This is general legal information, not legal advice. It covers Germany and European Union law and reflects sources verified on October 29, 2026. Laws change and this story is developing; consult a lawyer licensed in your jurisdiction about your specific situation.

Related articles

• Germany defamation law, civil and criminal remedies compared
• Datenschutz in Germany: the DSGVO, the BDSG and who enforces them
• BGH sets aside SCHUFA score disclosure orders

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Last updated: 2026-10-29. This is a developing story; details verified as of 2026-10-29.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did the BGH rule that Facebook is liable for the memes?

No. On October 27, 2026 the VI. Zivilsenat stayed the proceedings in VI ZR 64/24 and referred six questions of EU law to the Court of Justice of the European Union. It published no decision on liability. The case remains undecided in Karlsruhe, and the Court of Justice has not ruled either.

How long will the reference take?

The record does not say. This case shows how much time a reference can add: the same panel stayed it after the hearing of February 18, 2025 to await the Court of Justice in Case C-492/23, and that judgment arrived on December 2, 2025, after which the case had to be argued again before being referred in its own right. No date has been announced for an answer to the six questions referred in October 2026.

What does sinngleich mean in this context?

Sinngleich translates roughly as sense-identical or of equivalent meaning. Here it describes a meme that is not a byte-for-byte copy of the original but still conveys the same false impression, namely that the claimant said something she never said. The court's hearing notice records that similar memes can be located automatically but that judging sense-identity, especially for memes with captions, cannot be done by a purely automated process.

Which court decisions came before the referral?

The Landgericht Frankfurt am Main decided on April 8, 2022 in case 2-03 O 188/21 and granted the claim. The Oberlandesgericht Frankfurt am Main decided on January 25, 2024 in case 16 U 65/22, dismissing the claim for non-material damages but upholding the injunction. Both sides then appealed on points of law to the Bundesgerichtshof.

What damages were claimed?

Alongside the injunction the claimant sought at least EUR 10,000 in non-material damages, according to the court's hearing notice of October 22, 2026. The Oberlandesgericht dismissed that part of the claim, and the claimant's cross-appeal sought to have it restored. Whether such a claim can be brought under Article 82 of the GDPR against a hosting provider is part of what question 6 asks.

Is the written text of the referral order available?

Not as of October 29, 2026. The Bundesgerichtshof serves a standing notice at the decision's own address stating that the decision is not yet available in print and that no further information exists beyond the press release. Press release No. 204/2026 of October 27, 2026 is the authoritative source for the six questions until the order is published.

Does any of this affect platforms outside the European Union?

Not directly. The questions concern the interpretation of the GDPR, Directive 2000/31/EC and Regulation (EU) 2022/2065, which bind operators in relation to the EU market. United States platform immunity under 47 U.S.C. § 230 is a separate regime and is not at issue in this reference.