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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."
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.
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).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
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