German Court Orders X to Share Data with Researchers Ahead of National Vote
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | February 13, 2025
With a ruling that raises serious concerns about government-endorsed monitoring of online speech, a German court has ordered Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, to provide researchers with data to track so-called “election-swaying” information. The decision, handed down by the Berlin district court, follows an urgent complaint filed by two civil rights organizations demanding access to platform analytics ahead of Germany’s national election on February 23.
The court justified its ruling by arguing that “waiting any longer for access to the data would undermine the applicants’ research project since the period immediately before the election is crucial.” X had reportedly failed to respond to a request for information, leading the court to rule against the company and order it to pay €6,000 ($6,255) in legal costs.
The GFF and Democracy Reporting International claim that under European law, platforms like X must provide structured, easily searchable access to information about post reach, shares, and likes.
While this data is already publicly available, albeit requiring manual collection, activists insist that X should make it more accessible to their research efforts — effectively demanding that the platform do its work for them.
With this ruling, X is now compelled to provide this data from now until shortly after the election, a move that could open the door for further demands to police speech under the guise of fighting “disinformation.” The broad and subjective nature of what constitutes “misinformation” raises concerns about selective enforcement, particularly given the German government’s increasingly aggressive stance toward online speech regulation.
Given the timing of the ruling and the increasing pressure on social media platforms to police political speech, this case highlights the growing tension between free expression and state-backed efforts to control online speech.
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The Garlic Book — 2026
Lies are Unbekoming | November 5, 2026
What The Garlic Book shows
The book is in four parts.
Part One, The Record, treats the history of garlic as evidence. From the clay garlic bulb placed in an Egyptian grave nearly six thousand years ago, through the Ebers Papyrus, through Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen, the Arab physicians under Avicenna, the medieval herbals, Culpeper, and the plague years, to the last era in which Western physicians prescribed garlic as a matter of course, which ran from 1850 to 1945. It closes with the living traditions that never stopped using it, and with the folklore of charms, vampires and the evil eye.
Part Two, The Chemistry and the Evidence, sets out what is known about why a clove has no smell until it is cut, and why the order of crush, rest and heat changes the medicine. It then reads the clinical evidence against the historical record — bacteria, blood and vessels, cancer epidemiology, metals and fatigue — and names the trials that went against garlic as directly as the trials that went for it, including the 2007 Stanford trial funded by the US National Institutes of Health which found that raw garlic, garlic powder and aged garlic extract moved LDL cholesterol no more than placebo did. It then turns to onion, garlic’s closest relative, and reads the newer evidence published since 2015, before closing with the whole of the record through the terrain lens.
Part Three, Why Medicine Set It Aside, asks the question directly. One chapter contrasts the pharmaceutical model of isolating a single active compound with the folk model of combining whole plants, and reports what the garlic evidence says about which model works better. One chapter examines the economics of research on a plant that cannot be patented. One chapter — Fire Cider — tells the story of a folk preparation whose name was taken into a United States trademark by a Massachusetts company in 2012, and won back by three herbalists in 2014 who documented forty years of prior use through Rosemary Gladstar and her students into the older tradition.
Part Four, Garlic in Practice, is the working manual — the kitchen pharmacy, traditional uses by body system, a full chapter on safety and interactions, and a complaint-by-complaint practical guide. The book closes with The Trial That Was Never Run — a one-chapter reading of the whole evidential architecture.
At the back: two appendices (a traditional list of uses, and a preparation quick-reference), a full bibliography, and a live index.
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