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."

Comments

The real problem

[Ol Olsoc]

Is using Facebook for news. I can easily make up some splashy name and start crapping out bogus articles all day long. And the credulity of facebook users is such that no matter what I post, it will be followed.

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.

Re:The real problem

[BlueStrat]

Is using Facebook for news.

I think the real problem is that, at least in the US, the government has spent the last 60-80 years dumbing-down the populace so the government could convince them of most anything, only to have others taking advantage of their gullibility as well, throwing a wrench into their Orwellian Newspeak/MiniTruth schemes.

Strat

Well this seems simple enough

[OneoFamillion]

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.

NYT is Fake News

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:NYT is Fake News

[Ol Olsoc]

Why is Facebook the issue?

Everyothing is the issue. What has happened is that the fake news people have succeeded too well, and a lot of people are simply not believing anything. I'll give it some veracity if BBC or NPR reports on it, but at this point assume that what I'm reading is a lie. That's what happens when you succeed too well.

Re:NYT is Fake News

[AthanasiusKircher]

Yesterday, Washington Post ran a story that the Russians hacked our power grid.

Yep, and now that story contains a correction at the top of the page. That's what legitimate news sites do when they make factual errors. Fake news sites don't issue corrections, because their entire purpose is to make up facts.

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.

Actually, your timeline is a bit messed up. What actually happened was that New York Magazine reported in September that "Kelly had even begun to speculate, according to one Fox source, that Trump might have been responsible for her getting violently ill before the debate last summer. Could he have paid someone to slip something into her coffee that morning in Cleveland? she wondered to colleagues." This was NOT ignored in the media, but rather spread in September as a big rumor, which Kelly did NOT address or debunk at that time.

Then a couple months later when the New York Times published a book review, it talks about a passage where Kelly recounts the SAME weird story herself where a driver repeatedly insisted on giving her coffee and then rapidly became violently ill. Why exactly she reported that story in her book is unclear, but it seems to confirm that she did find the incident suspicious, as had already been reported in major media outlets two months earlier.

The NYT book review is NOT meant to be a solid piece of "factual journalism," but rather a playful dialogue with the book. Note the repeated "We report. You decide." quip in the review, which is meant to make fun of the Fox News slogan -- and in this case meant to signal a somewhat sarcastic rendering of this story from Kelly's book:

Ms. Kelly never says outright that someone tried to poison her. (A stomach bug was going around, she notes.) But the episode spooked her enough that she shared it later with Roger Ailes and a lawyer friend of his. Foul play? Again: She reports. You decide.

After this story becomes even more viral (no pun intended) than the September one did, Kelly steps in and tweets that it really was just a stomach bug. But why did she even tell the story in the first place in the book with her suspicion (of what?)?

At best, the book critic at the NYT could be accused of "reading between the lines" about a suspicious passage in the book and reporting an old story which had appeared elsewhere that had NOT been previously debunked by Kelly... and then making a playful "She reports. You decide." joke about it.

Seriously?? Those are the best examples of "fake news" in the mainstream media you can come up with?

This is an actual fake news site. It's made up of completely bogus articles, though it looks legit and the stories may sound vaguely legit if you only read the headline and first paragraph. But it's completely bogus, and most of the stories make that clear by becoming increasingly ridiculous when you read them.

YET a number of "articles" on that satirical site have been shared hundreds of thousands or even millions of times on Facebook as if they were real news. Are you seriously going to say that a corrected article in the WaPo and a quip that echoed a pre-existing st

Re:NYT is Fake News

[AthanasiusKircher]

Geez, can you read? Look at the rest of the story. The WaPo story, in addition to a number of unnamed sources that express serious security concerns based on this incident, also has quotes from the governor of Vermont and a senator from Vermont implying that this could be have been a deliberate threat.

I agree with you that this SOUNDS much less dire than that quotes make it, but when you have various government security officials telling you it's serious and the most senior elected officials in Vermont implying that their information says it could have been a targeted hack, what exactly is the WaPo supposed to report? "We have quotes from numerous government officials that this may be a serious threat from Russian hackers, but we at the WaPo -- who don't have access to all the detailed security info here -- think all these government officials are talking BS"?

It seems like they're reporting on what they're being told by government officials, and the text of their correction seems in line with that. I agree it sounds overly inflammatory (based solely on the limited facts we know), and I'll happily join with you in condemning the WaPo for jumping the gun and reporting an active hack without enough evidence. But I also don't see much wrong with their correction based on the other information they report from what sources are telling them.

Re:NYT is Fake News

[LetterRip]

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.

So what is fake news?

[Bender Unit 22]

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?

Re:Fake News Includes:

[elrous0]

Anything that makes Merkel and her disasterous policies look bad.

This, a thousand times this. The difference between "fake news" and "real news worthy of further investigation" is all in who gets to define it, of course.

A story entitled "Watergate Hotel Break-in Has Possible Ties to Nixon White House" would have been called "fake news" by most people in 1972 (and certainly by Nixon himself).

bipartisan?

[jandar]

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.

Re:This could be fun

[LynnwoodRooster]

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?

Re: Ah, I get the definition

[Layzej]

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.

Re:Don't you know?

[slashrio]

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?

Re:Merkel....

[lgw]

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 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?