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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
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.
I think the parents argument is that that harm done by disseminating false information is both a function of the inaccuracy of the information and its reach.
If a major news source intentionally slips subtle inaccuracies into their stories to push some agenda it could reasonably be argued that it causes more harm than a small no-name blog with no readership publishing blatant lies.
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.
Germany as a country – and its constitution – does not subscribe to that US-american view of unregulated free speech. Never did, and has a healthy free press anyway.
Germany is also a country that murdered millions of people in concentration camps less than a century ago. Which happened because National Socialists were suppressing views opposed to their own. So maybe, just maybe, unregulated free speech was a good idea after all.
Pff. First, that is not Germany as the BRD, but the Third Reich (which did not have the same constitution). Second, to link the holocaust to supressing opposing views is utterly crazy. Third, Godwin's Law.
No. However, there is a card (Presseausweis) that is given out by journalist unions to professional journalists only. Both public administration and private companies use that card to verify credibility. If you don't have one, people might not want to talk to you.
All media reported that. A suppression of information just did not happen. If you really believe that, start to consume other media than AFD-nazi-talk please.
Germany does not view free speech like the US does. For example, to this day anything related to Nazism is illegal. You can be arrested and fined for giving the Nazi salute. Germany likes to pick and choose their free speech now a day.
The concern is about an epistemic gap: We proabaly can’t know how to identify speech that is harmful to free-speech, and the cost of getting it wrong is likely to be tremendous in almost all cases.
It isn't. Speech that advocates the removal of free speech rights is unlikely to be successful and actually lead to the removal of free speech.
Speech is only speech. It cannot do anything by itself. The only way speech can affect the world is by urging people to do things that they would not have done otherwise.
> 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"
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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).
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.