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France's President Macron Wants To Block Websites During Elections To Fight 'Fake News' (gizmodo.com)

French President Emmanuel Macron has a rather extreme approach to combat fake news: ban entire websites. In a speech to journalists on Wednesday, Macron said he planned to introduce new legislation to strictly regulate fake news during online political campaigns. Gizmodo reports: His proposal included a number of measures, most drastically "an emergency legal action" that could enable the government to either scrap "fake news" from a website or even block a website altogether. "If we want to protect liberal democracies, we must be strong and have clear rules," Macron said. "When fake news are spread, it will be possible to go to a judge... and if appropriate have content taken down, user accounts deleted and ultimately websites blocked."

Macron, himself a target of election interference, also outlined some less extreme measures in his speech yesterday. He proposed more rigid requirements around transparency, specifically in relation to online ads during elections. According to the Guardian, Macron said the legislation would force platforms to publicly identify who their advertisers are, as well as limit how much they can spend on ads over the course of an election campaign.

2 of 299 comments (clear)

  1. Re:A perfectly good idea by goose-incarnated · · Score: 5, Informative

    I can think of no possible way this could be abused as political censorship to, say, protect the incumbent government from inconvenient reporting.

    That's literally in the summary:

    "If we want to protect liberal democracies[...]have content taken down, user accounts deleted and ultimately websites blocked."

    That stuff in the "[...]" is fluff to ensure that people don't see the two ends of the sentence together. They are literally saying they want political censorship.

    --
    I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
  2. Re:A perfectly good idea by gnick · · Score: 1, Informative

    ...all the slander against Trump didn't work out in the end.

    "Slander" is typically false. The stuff the MSM railed DJT for was mostly accurate. That's not slander; that's reporting. Are you upset that the MSM didn't spin the Access Hollywood tape as DJT "reaching out to women"?

    --
    He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.