7 ms·

Germany threatens to fine Facebook €500,000 for each fake news post

42 points by hellofunk 10y ago

mtgx 10y ago
That's crazy. Facebook should absolutely take the government to court over this. They're probably doing this because Google and Facebook have already agreed to a lot of things which may have seemed "reasonable" but this is really taking it too far. It's not Facebook's responsibility to verify the truthfulness of all the posts on its site. On the other hand, perhaps this forces Facebook to give up on being a "news platform", too, and not just a social network, which wouldn't be a terrible thing to happen.
- mschuster91 10y ago
  Oh no. It's about time that Facebook ramps up its user service. I have notified Facebook of countless violations, including calls to literally burn refugees, and all my complaints were discarded. Just a couple of days ago Süddeutsche Zeitung leaked internals on the user service teams: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/digital/exklusive-sz-magazin-recherche-inside-facebook-1.3297138 http://www.sueddeutsche.de/digital/exklusive-sz-magazin-rech... No psychological support even though the employees have to deal with more vile stuff than even 4chan, only 14.4 seconds (!) to deal with a single complaint (2k complaints/8h workday). No wonder Facebook is fucked up. What we're seeing, not just with FB but also with Twitter and Google, is the usual capitalism ideology of privatizing profits and externalizing losses - in this case the "loss" is the damage done to victims of propaganda, hate crime and "fake news". The "profit" is the amount of money that the companies save on actual customer support (which is my main complaint against Google).
  - wyager 10y ago
    You may be correct here, but none of that has anything to do with the "fake news" propaganda campaign.
- matt4077 10y ago
  Facebook seems to be pretty good at verifying the "no-nudity-containingness" of all posts on its site, so I can see why someone could get the impression that they should also be able to react to reports of "fake" or libellous posts. I'm somewhat doubtful that there'd be a legal basis to go after news that's simply "fake", because afaik you can't even get at the publishers of such drivel. But defamatory posts are probably fair game. Now that may appear like European crazy talk to American eyes, but just consider that Facebook is very much liable for some content in the US as well, namely copyright infringement that they don't block "expeditiously". This proposal seems to apply more or less the same mechanisms as the DMCA to a different category of "illegal speech", and I see now reason why copyright should be better protected than the democratic system.
- anotherarray 10y ago
  >Facebook should absolutely take the government to court over this This is not a contract between two corporations. A private corporation should NOT sue a government for creating a new law. As long as it's legally feasible, Germany should do whatever it deems necessary to its own sovereignty and interests.
  - michaelmrose 10y ago
    By that logic no individual has a right to contest any law no matter what
    - anotherarray 10y ago
      Your comparison is meaningless. 1) A corporation is not the same as a German citizen. 2) "Contest" is not the same as "suing" 3) No German has a net worth of over U$300B (FB's Market Cap)
      - michaelmrose 10y ago
        If they are operating within Germany they ought and I'm sure do have a right to file a lawsuit.
camus2 10y ago
You know what is worse than fake news ? A government suppressing speech. Who decides what is fake and what isn't ? This is what despotism looks like. It stems from good intentions at first then gets abused because people in charge will always abuse their power to silence the people.
- jaredtking 10y ago
  > Who decides what is fake or what isn't ? Ministry of Truth?
- IfOnlyYouKnew 10y ago
  > You know what is worse than fake news ? Spaces before punctuation? > Who decides what is fake or what isn't ? Courts. > This is what despotism looks like. No, despotism is what despotism looks like. > It looks like good intentions at first then gets abused[...] That's just the slippery slope fallacy. It doesn't work as an argument because it's too broad. I. e. "now they're outlawing shooting at people, next thing you know, you can't even shoot the breeze anymore"
  - wyager 10y ago
    Being snarky about the GP's spacing is not argumentatively useful. Courts deciding whether or not you're allowed to say something is only marginally better than other government officials deciding whether or not you're allowed to say something. Slippery slope is only a fallacy in the strict Boolean sense. It's a perfectly useful heuristic in Bayesian reasoning. In particular, it speaks to the effects of shifting the Overton Window.
    - WalterBright 10y ago
      The courts have consistently failed to find any objective standard for "obscenity". There's no reason to believe they would do any better for "truth". One man's art is another man's porn, one man's truth is another man's propaganda.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
mikebay 10y ago
Yes! Finally news that got my interest. People should leave Facebook asap. They are censoring "Freedom of speech" just like Google and Obama. Facebook ? - Fakebook should be the name.
germanier 10y ago
Two significant words from that proposal are missing from this article. The fine is supposed to be up to 500k. Other laws that are worded like that result in much much lower fines in every practical case. The linked DW article is more precise. It's also not "Germany" that is threatening this fine but a single (though influential) politician. The proposal has sparked quite some debate and nobody can say whether it will result in any new law let alone any details.
wyager 10y ago
"Fake news" is potentially the most blatant propaganda campaign I've seen in the last few years. It is a very transparent effort by large, established media groups to claim a monopoly on the dissemination of truth, and the campaign has thus far been frighteningly successful, as indicated by the OP. There's also a bit of a motte and bailey argument involved in this campaign. In particular, when people ask "Can't the 'fake news' label just be applied to any politically unfavorable news source to suppress them?", the response is usually "Oh, this will only be used for those crazy clickbait sites that just come up with random titles and spam Facebook ads.". But then in other contexts, it's very obvious that NYT, AP, etc. are using this to refer to lower-quality but only marginally more falsehood-prone tabloids like Breitbart. Besides the differing political bias, the difference between breitbart and NYT is a matter of selectivity. Breitbart might publish more questionable or false stories (higher false positive rate) but they also publish true things that the NYT doesn't (lower false negative rate). For example, NYT's coverage of the Podesta leaks was garbage, and I had to turn to smaller, less reputable news sources to find (100% verifiable) coverage of leaked email contents. Let's also not pretend that the media groups leading this campaign are innocent of (intentionally or unintentionally) publishing some outright false or misleading content themselves. Sure, they do it less frequently, but they're no saints. As for the OP, it is absolutely unreasonable to allow the government to dictate the truth. I should not have to spell out how that can and will go wrong. Permit people to believe what they will. If you're worried about false information, try to make better information management tools rather than using the government to force people into some arbitrarily chosen "correct" belief system. This isn't some stupid appeal to the idea that objective truth doesn't exist; it's recognizing the fact that any one person (or government Ministry of Truth) is almost certainly wrong about a non-negligible number of things, and it's better for at least some people to be right about any given topic than for every single person to be uniformly right or wrong about any given topic.
- codeddesign 10y ago
  If a news organization does it less frequently but has a much larger reach...where does that stand? If a website is 40% questionable with a low readership, but another is 10% questionable but reaches millions a day...who is more fake? Who is more accountable? NY Times and Washington Post run heavy political bias in their reporting with some questionable articles over the past month. Because of their resources and readership, if 10% of their content is intentionally misleading...is that fake news? Would they be considered a fake news site because they mislead a large segment of the population in 10% of their content? Or have they been socially deemed as "real news"? This is all for example sake.. ..what is fake news compared to real news? Are their really any news outlets that are unbiased, bipartisan, in-regurgitated, real news? My answer would be...what ever sells the most papers, that is what is printed. A news paper seing their shares fall because of a million small small sites acting as regurgitation machines is starting to take its toll, and papers are calling foul and continually running with that story. There is no real news anymore.
duckingtest 10y ago
Totalitarianism, plain and simple. How are you even supposed to verify if a news piece is fake in 24h? You can't. '<major politician> engaged in a <criminal activity>'. No way to verify. If genuinely fake news, delete - no fine, not delete - big fine. If true, delete - no fine, not delete - risk of fine, which may or may not be returned later, depending on how powerful said politician is... So the end result is that only news from entities explicitly allowed by the government are safe to keep. Here's a funny thing: the only government that's not going to abuse this is the one that's not hiding anything nefarious! So the end result is: all stories that uncover really bad things about the government are going to disappear, and the entity that made/published it is going to be labelled 'fake news' if it wasn't already. Which means the only way for a media entity to survive is to self-censor.
- manquer 10y ago
  It is not that difficult actually. It requires some human effort that fb and Google are idealogically unwilling to consider. it as simple as requiring accreditation to the national press associations as "real" news orgs have and validating credentials as event venues do for example. Automated solution only approaxg and democratisation of news(I.e bloggers) is an ideological stand not a practical limitations
  - synicalx 10y ago
    But how does having 'credentials' mean that they're publishing real news? All that does is give the Government control over who can and can't publish news, and you cannot possibly argue that this is a good thing in any way. In the US election coverage there have been numerous examples of established 'real' news outlets like CNN, and nice touchy-feely 'acceptable' outlets like Huffington Post publishing stories that have either been outright lies or completely misleading.
wcummings 10y ago
If Germany does this the EU will be next, I'm sure Facebook will fight this kicking and screaming. Facebook has a moral responsibility to exercise some editorial control imho.
- e2kp 10y ago
  I'd rather have a shitload fo shit content (that i can choose or not to consume) than be censored to be honest. Governments should stop taking for granted that their people are sheep, and maybe then they will stop being so easily manipulated
g00gler 10y ago
Guys I'm pretty sure the "fake news" is the real and honest news. This is obviously the illuminati trying to lash out after their recent losses (Brexit, Trump, Italy). Next thing you know YouTube will be forced to take down all of the FEMA camp and moon truther videos.

42 points by hellofunk 10y ago

mtgx 10y ago

That's crazy. Facebook should absolutely take the government to court over this. They're probably doing this because Google and Facebook have already agreed to a lot of things which may have seemed "reasonable" but this is really taking it too far. It's not Facebook's responsibility to verify the truthfulness of all the posts on its site. On the other hand, perhaps this forces Facebook to give up on being a "news platform", too, and not just a social network, which wouldn't be a terrible thing to happen.

mschuster91 10y ago
Oh no. It's about time that Facebook ramps up its user service. I have notified Facebook of countless violations, including calls to literally burn refugees, and all my complaints were discarded. Just a couple of days ago Süddeutsche Zeitung leaked internals on the user service teams: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/digital/exklusive-sz-magazin-recherche-inside-facebook-1.3297138 http://www.sueddeutsche.de/digital/exklusive-sz-magazin-rech... No psychological support even though the employees have to deal with more vile stuff than even 4chan, only 14.4 seconds (!) to deal with a single complaint (2k complaints/8h workday). No wonder Facebook is fucked up. What we're seeing, not just with FB but also with Twitter and Google, is the usual capitalism ideology of privatizing profits and externalizing losses - in this case the "loss" is the damage done to victims of propaganda, hate crime and "fake news". The "profit" is the amount of money that the companies save on actual customer support (which is my main complaint against Google).
- wyager 10y ago
  You may be correct here, but none of that has anything to do with the "fake news" propaganda campaign.
matt4077 10y ago
Facebook seems to be pretty good at verifying the "no-nudity-containingness" of all posts on its site, so I can see why someone could get the impression that they should also be able to react to reports of "fake" or libellous posts. I'm somewhat doubtful that there'd be a legal basis to go after news that's simply "fake", because afaik you can't even get at the publishers of such drivel. But defamatory posts are probably fair game. Now that may appear like European crazy talk to American eyes, but just consider that Facebook is very much liable for some content in the US as well, namely copyright infringement that they don't block "expeditiously". This proposal seems to apply more or less the same mechanisms as the DMCA to a different category of "illegal speech", and I see now reason why copyright should be better protected than the democratic system.
anotherarray 10y ago
>Facebook should absolutely take the government to court over this This is not a contract between two corporations. A private corporation should NOT sue a government for creating a new law. As long as it's legally feasible, Germany should do whatever it deems necessary to its own sovereignty and interests.
- michaelmrose 10y ago
  By that logic no individual has a right to contest any law no matter what
  - anotherarray 10y ago
    Your comparison is meaningless. 1) A corporation is not the same as a German citizen. 2) "Contest" is not the same as "suing" 3) No German has a net worth of over U$300B (FB's Market Cap)
    - michaelmrose 10y ago
      If they are operating within Germany they ought and I'm sure do have a right to file a lawsuit.

camus2 10y ago

You know what is worse than fake news ? A government suppressing speech. Who decides what is fake and what isn't ? This is what despotism looks like. It stems from good intentions at first then gets abused because people in charge will always abuse their power to silence the people.

jaredtking 10y ago
> Who decides what is fake or what isn't ? Ministry of Truth?
IfOnlyYouKnew 10y ago
> You know what is worse than fake news ? Spaces before punctuation? > Who decides what is fake or what isn't ? Courts. > This is what despotism looks like. No, despotism is what despotism looks like. > It looks like good intentions at first then gets abused[...] That's just the slippery slope fallacy. It doesn't work as an argument because it's too broad. I. e. "now they're outlawing shooting at people, next thing you know, you can't even shoot the breeze anymore"
- wyager 10y ago
  Being snarky about the GP's spacing is not argumentatively useful. Courts deciding whether or not you're allowed to say something is only marginally better than other government officials deciding whether or not you're allowed to say something. Slippery slope is only a fallacy in the strict Boolean sense. It's a perfectly useful heuristic in Bayesian reasoning. In particular, it speaks to the effects of shifting the Overton Window.
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    The courts have consistently failed to find any objective standard for "obscenity". There's no reason to believe they would do any better for "truth". One man's art is another man's porn, one man's truth is another man's propaganda.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

mikebay 10y ago

Yes! Finally news that got my interest. People should leave Facebook asap. They are censoring "Freedom of speech" just like Google and Obama. Facebook ? - Fakebook should be the name.

germanier 10y ago

Two significant words from that proposal are missing from this article. The fine is supposed to be up to 500k. Other laws that are worded like that result in much much lower fines in every practical case. The linked DW article is more precise. It's also not "Germany" that is threatening this fine but a single (though influential) politician. The proposal has sparked quite some debate and nobody can say whether it will result in any new law let alone any details.

wyager 10y ago

"Fake news" is potentially the most blatant propaganda campaign I've seen in the last few years. It is a very transparent effort by large, established media groups to claim a monopoly on the dissemination of truth, and the campaign has thus far been frighteningly successful, as indicated by the OP. There's also a bit of a motte and bailey argument involved in this campaign. In particular, when people ask "Can't the 'fake news' label just be applied to any politically unfavorable news source to suppress them?", the response is usually "Oh, this will only be used for those crazy clickbait sites that just come up with random titles and spam Facebook ads.". But then in other contexts, it's very obvious that NYT, AP, etc. are using this to refer to lower-quality but only marginally more falsehood-prone tabloids like Breitbart. Besides the differing political bias, the difference between breitbart and NYT is a matter of selectivity. Breitbart might publish more questionable or false stories (higher false positive rate) but they also publish true things that the NYT doesn't (lower false negative rate). For example, NYT's coverage of the Podesta leaks was garbage, and I had to turn to smaller, less reputable news sources to find (100% verifiable) coverage of leaked email contents. Let's also not pretend that the media groups leading this campaign are innocent of (intentionally or unintentionally) publishing some outright false or misleading content themselves. Sure, they do it less frequently, but they're no saints. As for the OP, it is absolutely unreasonable to allow the government to dictate the truth. I should not have to spell out how that can and will go wrong. Permit people to believe what they will. If you're worried about false information, try to make better information management tools rather than using the government to force people into some arbitrarily chosen "correct" belief system. This isn't some stupid appeal to the idea that objective truth doesn't exist; it's recognizing the fact that any one person (or government Ministry of Truth) is almost certainly wrong about a non-negligible number of things, and it's better for at least some people to be right about any given topic than for every single person to be uniformly right or wrong about any given topic.

codeddesign 10y ago
If a news organization does it less frequently but has a much larger reach...where does that stand? If a website is 40% questionable with a low readership, but another is 10% questionable but reaches millions a day...who is more fake? Who is more accountable? NY Times and Washington Post run heavy political bias in their reporting with some questionable articles over the past month. Because of their resources and readership, if 10% of their content is intentionally misleading...is that fake news? Would they be considered a fake news site because they mislead a large segment of the population in 10% of their content? Or have they been socially deemed as "real news"? This is all for example sake.. ..what is fake news compared to real news? Are their really any news outlets that are unbiased, bipartisan, in-regurgitated, real news? My answer would be...what ever sells the most papers, that is what is printed. A news paper seing their shares fall because of a million small small sites acting as regurgitation machines is starting to take its toll, and papers are calling foul and continually running with that story. There is no real news anymore.

duckingtest 10y ago

Totalitarianism, plain and simple. How are you even supposed to verify if a news piece is fake in 24h? You can't. '<major politician> engaged in a <criminal activity>'. No way to verify. If genuinely fake news, delete - no fine, not delete - big fine. If true, delete - no fine, not delete - risk of fine, which may or may not be returned later, depending on how powerful said politician is... So the end result is that only news from entities explicitly allowed by the government are safe to keep. Here's a funny thing: the only government that's not going to abuse this is the one that's not hiding anything nefarious! So the end result is: all stories that uncover really bad things about the government are going to disappear, and the entity that made/published it is going to be labelled 'fake news' if it wasn't already. Which means the only way for a media entity to survive is to self-censor.

manquer 10y ago
It is not that difficult actually. It requires some human effort that fb and Google are idealogically unwilling to consider. it as simple as requiring accreditation to the national press associations as "real" news orgs have and validating credentials as event venues do for example. Automated solution only approaxg and democratisation of news(I.e bloggers) is an ideological stand not a practical limitations
- synicalx 10y ago
  But how does having 'credentials' mean that they're publishing real news? All that does is give the Government control over who can and can't publish news, and you cannot possibly argue that this is a good thing in any way. In the US election coverage there have been numerous examples of established 'real' news outlets like CNN, and nice touchy-feely 'acceptable' outlets like Huffington Post publishing stories that have either been outright lies or completely misleading.

wcummings 10y ago

If Germany does this the EU will be next, I'm sure Facebook will fight this kicking and screaming. Facebook has a moral responsibility to exercise some editorial control imho.

e2kp 10y ago
I'd rather have a shitload fo shit content (that i can choose or not to consume) than be censored to be honest. Governments should stop taking for granted that their people are sheep, and maybe then they will stop being so easily manipulated

g00gler 10y ago

Guys I'm pretty sure the "fake news" is the real and honest news. This is obviously the illuminati trying to lash out after their recent losses (Brexit, Trump, Italy). Next thing you know YouTube will be forced to take down all of the FEMA camp and moon truther videos.