What are the consequences if wild insults by colleagues or bosses from closed WhatsApp groups become public? The Federal Labor Court deals with a number of issues.
Members of closed chat groups on the Internet can only rely on confidentiality protection in the case of racist remarks or insults from work colleagues in exceptional cases.
You can face extraordinary dismissal if inhuman taunts become public, the Federal Labor Court ruled on Thursday in Erfurt in the case of a WhatsApp group at the airline TUIfly GmbH in Lower Saxony. An expectation of confidentiality depends on the nature of the messages and the size of the group.
In the proceedings, Germany’s highest labor judges dealt for the first time with the question of whether a small WhatsApp group is a kind of protected, private space in which confidentiality applies and insults or insults can be exchanged without labor law sanctions. According to experts, the case law on defamatory statements in closed groups of messaging services has so far been inconsistent in Germany.
Source: Stern
