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.

Comments

A perfectly good idea

[russotto]

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

Re:A perfectly good idea

[amiga3D]

But right now both sides can use that tactic, that's called free speech. When only one side gets to tell their bullshit that is censorship. The fact that anyone could make a serious pitch for censoring free speech is chilling.

Re:A perfectly good idea

[goose-incarnated]

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.

Re:A perfectly good idea

[mwvdlee]

Hearing idiots speak is the price you pay for your own freedom of speech.

Re:A perfectly good idea

[RedK]

So let's tie up the court system in dealing with judicial attacks between political opponents, while actual judicial matters pile up from the now lack of judges and court clerks to process actual requests for actual justice.

Sounds like a great plan even if both sides get to use it as a tool!

How bout this : The solution is never more governement. There already exists libel and slander laws. The bar is already high enough. Let's not give courts the power to censor the Internet.

Re:A perfectly good idea

[Kiuas]

"Liberal democracies" does not mean the same in Europe as in the US. Over here Liberalism is almost the polar opposite of Socialism

Someone didn't stay awake during classes I see. It's true that in colloquial usage there's a bif difference in the way the word liberal is used on the 2 sides of the Atlantic but the root cause of confusion is that on both sides people have forgotten that the political spectrum is not a line, it's a grid. The X-axis from left to right describes one's attitude to the economy and the role of the government in it. The Y-axis is is the liberal-authoritarian axis that describes one's attitude to individual rights.

There are quite a few leftist liberals both in the US and Europe, myself among them. I'm actually on the same page with right-wing libertarians on many topics, because we share common ground on the Y-axis which is what makes us liberal. I believe adults should be able to decide for themselves which substances they wish to enjoy, I believe in strong freedom of speech (and do not support laws like this) and so on. I also oppose the authoritarian left that mainly fuels itself with identity politics. These are the people who in the name of 'equality' think it'd be a good idea for example to legislate mandatory quotas for sexes in corporate boards and so on which in my opinion goes against true egalitarian principles.

In the US the term 'liberal' is currently thrown about mainly to refer to the more authoritarian left because of "liberal values" that they hold, even though they're closer to the other side of the liberal-authoritarian divide, but understandably very few people self-identify as authoritarian. Here in Finland the small 'liberal party' is indeed a right-leaning libertarian party, but it should be noted that unlike their US counterparts, said right-wing liberals here do not for example oppose universal health care, because a from a liberal point of view the argument can easily be made that since individuals cannot determine their own conditions of birth, the belief in equality of individuals necessitates that it is not right to gate people's access to a life-saving basic service based on their wealth or the wealth of their family. Put another way: it is no-one's fault for being born into a poor family, so the individual that is born into such a circumstance should not be punished for the mistakes of his/her parents, as the child is not responsible for the (poor) choices of his parents. Now I have my disagreements with the liberal party here as to how said universal model is to be arranged. I'm in favor of the currently existing universal single payer model which has kept costs very much down and is working very well results-wise, the liberals want to lessen the role of the state and take in more private instances. So because I'm more to the left of the liberal party, we differ on implementation, not the principle.

And of course we're completely ignoring the root of all this nonsense - interference from Vladimir Putin

Vlad is certainly a factor here, he's been promoting different nationalist groups across Europe for a long time indirectly because the more anti-EU sentiments there are in Europe, the better it is for Russia as it weakens cohesion of the Union. However, the thing to note is that this will not be solved by stooping down to the same level with Vlad and starting to censor critics and those who speak bullshit. In fact that's precisely what the Kremlin wants. The very moment websites start to be censored because they're 'fake news' they will start hammering the martyrdom angle real hard, saying that 'the truth is being silenced because the politicians don't want you to know it", which will only re-enforce the animosity and work in their favor because they can then say that European leaders are not in line with what the values of the Union are, freedom of speech being among the core values of all western societies.

Freedom of speech however is not freedom from con

Censorship hard to make work

[Roger W Moore]

I can think of no possible way this could be abused as political censorship

While I detect a certain sarcastic tone I think you might actually be correct, not because they would not abuse it but simply because censoring the web does not work regardless of reason. Any affected website will just move to another country. This will apply both to real fake news sites as well as those targeted for political reasons. The can make it illegal in France but not Canada, the US or any other country with strong free speech laws.

Re:There is a scientific basis for this.

[AmiMoJo]

In the face of it, it seems like he wants a fast track legal procedure. The law already allows action against this kind of thing (slander/libel etc) but it often moves slowly and elections are a hard deadline.

It might actually be a good way to handle fake news. There will be the transparency and oversight of the legal system, with separation of politicians and judiciary. If the news isn't fake then trying to abuse the system is unlikely to end well for the abuser.

Probably worth trying. My main concern would be the potential cost of mounting a defence. In the interests of democracy it should be free for both sides.

Teaching

[DrYak]

And teaching poeple how not to fall to obvious snake oil salesmen and ovious trolls is how you should handle it.

Not blocking the free speech on reasons of "idiots speaking".

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(It's sad that this is coming from the French president, as they are one of the few countries to actually teach "media" in school and having pilot programs to teach kids how to spot urban myths/click bait/fake news/etc.)