Under new rules approved by the German parliament on Friday, social media companies will face fines of up to 50 million euros ($57 million) if they fail to remove illegal hate speech from their platforms within 24 hours.

The new hate speech rules will take effect in October, Reuters reports. They require Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other companies to delete or block obviously criminal content within 24 hours. Less clear-cut cases involving ambiguous content must be resolved within seven days.

The rules apply to social media sites with more than 2 million users in Germany, according to the New York Times. In addition to a maximum penalty of $57 million for violations, a violating company's chief representative in Germany will also face fines of up to 5 million euros ($5.7 million).

Facebook criticized the new German law as ineffective. "This law as it stands now will not improve efforts to tackle this important societal problem," a spokesman tells Reuters.

Facebook has increasingly publicized its efforts to eradicate hate speech, announcing this week that it has 4,500 people on its community operations team, and plans to add 3,000 more over the next year. The company has also admitted that it makes mistakes in deciding when to take down content.

"Our mistakes have caused a great deal of concern in a number of communities, including among groups who feel we act — or fail to act — out of bias," Facebook wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. "We are deeply committed to addressing and confronting bias anywhere it may exist. At the same time, we work to fix our mistakes quickly when they happen."

Twitter has also beefed up its ability to police hate speech and other objectionable content. But it too has been the subject of criticism, especially in Europe, where Germany's new law will join other anti-hate speech laws already on the books.

A French law passed in 2004 requires websites to remove content that is "manifestly illicit" in a timely manner if they know about it. Advocacy groups complained last year that Twitter removed just 4 percent of the offending posts on its network in a timely manner, while YouTube and Facebook did only slightly better.