Germany is proposing legislation that would penalize Facebook and other social networks for failing to remove posts containing hate speech or fake news.

"If, after appropriate examination, Facebook does not delete the offending message within 24 hours, it should expect individual fines of up to €500,000," said a German politician.

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The measures considered by Germany's current Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition government include forcing tech companies to set up clear channels for registering complaints, to publish the number of complaints they receive and to hire legally qualified ombudsmen to carry out deletions, the Guardian reported.

Online platforms that fail to meet these legal requirements could be hit with on-the-spot fines of up to €500,000 or fines calculated on the basis of their global annual turnover.

Germany has some of the toughest laws in the world against hate speech including prison sentences for Holocaust denial and inciting hatred against minorities. The tech companies' inability and refusal to take responsibility for content posted on their sites has led to political disturbance that has increased markedly in recent months.

In autumn 2015, German justice minister Heiko Maas set up a hate speech taskforce including representatives from Google, Facebook, and Twitter who vowed to delete illegal postings within 24 hours. But, according to a government report published in late September, the tech companies kept struggling to react adequately, with Facebook, YouTube and Twitter only deleting 46 percent, 10 percent, and 1 percent respectively of the illegal content flagged upby normal, non-privileged users.

While, according to a German law, the upper limit of imposing a fine for criminal offenses is €10 million, the justice ministry is independently looking into whether fines should be calculated on the basis of a company's global annual turnover.

"Companies that make money with their social networks have social obligations - it cannot be in any company's interest that their platform is used to commit crimes", said Maas, a member of the centre-left Social Democratic party.

While the debate in Germany has mostly focused on postings on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, the proposed law would also have wide-ranging consequences on Google.