Slashdot Mirror
Germany Considers Fining Facebook $522,000 Per Fake News Item (heatst.com)
"The government of Germany is considering imposing a legal regime that would allow fining social networks such as Facebook up to 500,000 euros ($522,000) for each day the platform leaves a 'fake news' story up without deleting it," according to a story shared by schwit1. PC Magazine has more details:
The law would reportedly apply to other social networks as well. "If after the relevant checks Facebook does not immediately, within 24 hours, delete the offending post then [it] must reckon with severe penalties of up to 500,000 euros," Germany's parliamentary chief of the Social Democrat party Thomas Oppermann said in an interview with Germany's Der Spiegel magazine, according to a report from Heat Street. Under the law, "official and private complainants" would be able to flag news on Facebook as fake, Heat Street reported. Facebook and other affected social networks would have to create "in-country offices focused on responding to takedown demands," the report says. The bill, slated for consideration next year, is said to have bipartisan support.
According to the article, "Lawmakers in the country are reportedly hoping it will prevent Russia from interfering in Germany's elections next year."
As noted by Glenn Greenwald, WaPo posted fake news last week
"the Russians hacked a couple of people at the Democratic Party (maybe) and embarrassed the hell out of them"
And even this has not been substantiated to the public by the US intelligence agencies.
The actual story is "the Russians hacked a couple of people at the Democratic Party (maybe) and embarrassed the hell out of them"
The actual actual story is that the Russians hacked some people at both parties, but selectively chose to release only a selection of the ones stolen from the Democratic party.
The actual story is "the Russians hacked a couple of people at the Democratic Party (maybe) and embarrassed the hell out of them"
The actual actual story is that the Russians hacked some people at both parties, but selectively chose to release only a selection of the ones stolen from the Democratic party.
You're spreading fake news. Your own source contradicts you: "An initial scan by POLITICO of the Republican-linked emails did not uncover any bombshell revelations". GOP e-mails were released, too - but there was nothing damning in it. Maybe, just maybe, the Democrats are dirtier than the GOP?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Speaking of fake news, can anybody prove a specific news story was fake and had a measurable effect on election results, with data to back that up? No takers?
How about anything published by Jestin Coler, CEO of a company called Disinfomedia?
During the run-up to the presidential election, fake news really took off. "It was just anybody with a blog can get on there and find a big, huge Facebook group of kind of rabid Trump supporters just waiting to eat up this red meat that they're about to get served," Coler says.
At any given time, Coler says, he has between 20 and 25 writers. And it was one of them who wrote the story in the Denver Guardian that an FBI agent who leaked Clinton emails was killed. Coler says that over 10 days the site got 1.6 million views.
"The people wanted to hear this," he says. "So all it took was to write that story. Everything about it was fictional: the town, the people, the sheriff, the FBI guy. And then ... our social media guys kind of go out and do a little dropping it throughout Trump groups and Trump forums and boy it spread like wildfire."
And as the stories spread, Coler makes money from the ads on his websites. He wouldn't give exact figures, but he says stories about other fake-news proprietors making between $10,000 and $30,000 a month apply to him.
Yesterday, Washington Post ran a story that the Russians hacked our power grid. What happened was a laptop, not connected to the grid, owned by the power company had malware on it. It wasn't even a valid news event, but they reported the Russians did it. Fake News.
The way you hack a system that is off the internet (air gapped - as most of the hardware that is directly connected to major infrastructure such as refineries and power generation) is that you leave USB sticks with malware on them where a victim will find them.
The victim then goes 'hmm I wonder what is on this USB stick' - plugs it into the computer, and the malware you put on the USB stick is transferred to the laptop.
Then once the laptop is used by a technician on the air gapped hardware, the infrastructure gets infected.
They 'hacked the power company', which is what the story claimed, they simply were unable to bridge the air gap because someone caught the infection in time.
Since the malware bore the signature of Russian hackers, it wasn't a 'fake' news story, you were simply not well enough informed to understand what was going on.