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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."
It's interesting, but you will do better to assume that any "news" item you read on Facebook is just a lie.
But how would you get rid of the problem? Facebook is up against the same problem that took down Usenet - the tragedy of the commons. NPR and BBC are treated with the same weight as Joe Blow cranking out crap and conspiracies just for the lulz in his basement.
I wouldn't be surprised if readership is falling. After I had to open a FB account last year, it looked interesting for about a week, then it became an annoyance, now it seems to be troll land.
And as quickly as fake news is deleted, new ones will pop up, and will make note of being deleted, which will feed into conspiracies.
The future does not look so bright for Facebook as they will probably suffer the same fate as usenet.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
As noted by Glenn Greenwald, WaPo posted fake news last week
Anything that makes Merkel and her disasterous policies look bad. Will facebook remove the reports of NYE sexual assaults too as fake news?
Most of the people whining about this seem to have no idea that the "fake news" they know about is only a fraction of the problem.
What's really funny is that about 90% of the things they like would fall under this umbrella, including a lot of content from the "real" media.
The "Russians Hacked the Election" story, for example...
The actual story is "the Russians hacked a couple of people at the Democratic Party (maybe) and embarrassed the hell out of them" - but the way it's being told, most of the Democrats you meet think there was actual nationwide vote tampering by Russian hacking. So far, the only vote tampering found was in Detroit, and it was done by hand, not by computer. Not to mention who won overwhelmingly in those precincts...
Of course this sort of jurisdiction could never be misused, or used as a political weapon to silence the opposition. True and fake being the binary value it is, this seems completely harmless, and totally healthy to me. A simple, elegant, final solution.
Why is Facebook the issue?
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.
NYT a couple days after the election reported Trump had poisoned Meghan Kelly before the first debate. Their source was Mrs. Kelly. Every other news outlet rushed to her to get details and she said that never happened. Fake News.
So you have "real" news outlets literally making up fake news stories worse than you could find on Facebook, but you seem to only be worried about Facebook. The whole "fake news" thing came about because the NYT should be able to run any story they want without being questioned, but no one else should be allowed to run a story they don't want run. You even had CNN reporting that it was illegal for US citizens to read Wikileaks, and anything important in them CNN would let you know about.
Fake News isn't about Fake News. Fake News is about the news outlets no longer being able to lie and bury stories that go against their editorial narrative. They lost complete control and this is their attempt to take it back. Its just like when the MPAA tried to make recording DVDs illegal.
Does it include the big media news sources that takes something that is a rumor and runs with it?
Does it include the omission of fact? When it is not a lie, but it is also not the entire story but they omit something because it doesn't not fit their narrative?
Or is it just those stories that shows the government doing a piss poor job of running the country?
So how much is owed to Facebook (or whoever) each time someone misuses this to take down something they don't like? How about €500,000 per incident?
What does "bipartisan support" mean in a system with 7 (*) parties governing the various legislative organs and a federal government of a coalition of 3 parties?
Do the US American journalists have no vocabulary to describe the reality outside of their country?
(*) I hope I haven't missed any party.
I can't even prove with 100 accuracy that you're not a child molester. I'd better earn your neighbors just in case.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Fake news is:
Iraq had WMDs.
During the Kuwait invasion Iraqi soldiers threw the babies out of the incubators and took them (the incubators) home.
The Vietnamese attacked a US aircraft carrier with rubber boats in the Gulf of Tonkin.
Iran wants to destroy Israel.
Ghaddafi was killing his citizens, just for fun.
Assad threw nerve gas to his citizens, also for the fun of it, or to punish them for support to ISIS (yeah right).
I'm sure we can find some more after some digging.
Is Reuters now going to pay half a million for every spin story they publish in order to get 'we the people' lined up behind the war plans of our governments?
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
It's known that Bill Clinton thinks with his dick from time to time and likes young women.
Thank goodness that's not true of Trump. And he has the decency to marry his pornstar child brides after cheating with them on his previous wives.
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As long as she was able to get what she wanted she let the men play around with the provision that if they crossed her then she would reveal their play.
And don't forget that no other woman is history has ever done such a thing.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Facebook and other affected social networks would have to create "in-country offices focused on responding to takedown demands," the report says.
Orwell only got the timeframe wrong, and the fact that it'll be a public-private partnership instead of purely governmental.
What exactly did you want to say? Taking down "Fake News" from your web site is ... hm, wrong?
Being forced to do it by law is ... wrong?
Is something wrong with your mind?
The problem here is that, similarly to DMCA takedowns, the default action is going to be to take it down as soon as a complaint is filed, not perform some sort of investigation to make sure the complaint is legit. So if you're a party bent on suppressing unfavorable or inconvenient news, it'll be in your interest to gin up complaints to get it removed. The only thing that would act to ameliorate this would be fines for illegitimate complaints, and what are the chances of that happening?
In the days before social media, we simply called this "gossip" rather than "fake news". The problem isn't Facebook, or Google, or the New York Times, or BBC, or any of the other organizations people seem all too eager to blame.
The problem is us. People have this bad tendency to give too much credibility to unconfirmed information sources. Especially if what that source is telling us is something we want to believe is true (which is why the left is eating up all the fake news about Russia hacking the election, while the right is eating up all the fake news about illegal immigrants voting in the election). All newspapers and later the Internet and social media do is give more leverage for a single person or organization to spread their gossip to more people.
For that reason, fining Facebook or shutting down news organizations isn't the solution. All that does is hide the problem. The gossip still gets spread, albeit less effectively, by word of mouth (or by email/text today). To address the problem, you have to train people to be cautiously critical about stories that they hear or see, whether it's from a friend of a friend, from a social media site, or on the TV news. Unfortunately, it's suicidal for a democratic government to point the finger of blame at the voters who elected it into power. So they create bogeymen out of easy targets like Facebook and blame them for the problem.
That was the good Comey; the one who lied about the law to give Hillary a pass.
Not the evil Comey; the one who gave the election to Trump by actually looking at new data just before the election.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
What exactly did you want to say? ... hm, wrong? ... wrong?
Taking down "Fake News" from your web site is
Being forced to do it by law is
Is something wrong with your mind?
The government will fine you $500k/day for any story the government tells you is fake news. And I suspect you can't wait for a note from the government, no, you have to predict what stories the government won't like, so better error on the side of deletion. If you can't see how that is wrong, congratulations, you're a totalitarian.
Do people just go around believing that the actual purpose of a law is it's stated purpose? Do you believe salesmen, too?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Um, there have been 45 presidential elections which were bigger "landslides" than Trump's. 77% of past presidential elections had bigger margins. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...)
When you consider that Trump lost the popular vote by a relatively large margin, it is a huuuge stretch to call his election a landslide.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
Wow, you're an actual enthusiastic totalitarian. Eeesh. Kind of scary.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.