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Germany Considers Fining Facebook $522,000 Per Fake News Item (heatst.com) 333

"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."
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Germany Considers Fining Facebook $522,000 Per Fake News Item

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  • The real problem (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Sunday January 01, 2017 @09:52AM (#53587909)
    Is using Facebook for news. I can easily make up some splashy name and start crapping out bogus articles all day long. And the credulity of facebook users is such that no matter what I post, it will be followed.

    It's interesting, but you will do better to assume that any "news" item you read on Facebook is just a lie.

    But how would you get rid of the problem? Facebook is up against the same problem that took down Usenet - the tragedy of the commons. NPR and BBC are treated with the same weight as Joe Blow cranking out crap and conspiracies just for the lulz in his basement.

    I wouldn't be surprised if readership is falling. After I had to open a FB account last year, it looked interesting for about a week, then it became an annoyance, now it seems to be troll land.

    And as quickly as fake news is deleted, new ones will pop up, and will make note of being deleted, which will feed into conspiracies.

    The future does not look so bright for Facebook as they will probably suffer the same fate as usenet.

    • NYT is Fake News (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Why is Facebook the issue?

      Yesterday, Washington Post ran a story that the Russians hacked our power grid. What happened was a laptop, not connected to the grid, owned by the power company had malware on it. It wasn't even a valid news event, but they reported the Russians did it. Fake News.

      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 happene

      • by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Sunday January 01, 2017 @10:46AM (#53588069)

        Why is Facebook the issue?

        Everyothing is the issue. What has happened is that the fake news people have succeeded too well, and a lot of people are simply not believing anything. I'll give it some veracity if BBC or NPR reports on it, but at this point assume that what I'm reading is a lie. That's what happens when you succeed too well.

        • Articles should have scores on at least two dimensions: reliability and popularity. Popularity can be captured by something like "likes," but reliability should be determined in a different way. Coming from a major news source like the Washington Post or the New York Times should give an initial leg up on reliability (say start at sixty percent if from them), but not more than that unless it's a piece they specially flag as a significant product of investigative reporting. Most stuff that most reputable sou

        • In the days before social media, we simply called this "gossip" rather than "fake news". The problem isn't Facebook, or Google, or the New York Times, or BBC, or any of the other organizations people seem all too eager to blame.

          The problem is us. People have this bad tendency to give too much credibility to unconfirmed information sources. Especially if what that source is telling us is something we want to believe is true (which is why the left is eating up all the fake news about Russia hacking the
        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          The problem with that is that assuming evening is a lie leads to post-truth politics. Truth becomes irrelevant, facts are things you pick and choose to suit your established views. Then guys like Michael Gove and Donald Trump come along, telling you sweet lies and you figure that you might as well vote for them because when everything is a lie too your gut feeling is all that matters.

      • by AthanasiusKircher ( 1333179 ) on Sunday January 01, 2017 @11:45AM (#53588279)

        Yesterday, Washington Post ran a story that the Russians hacked our power grid.

        Yep, and now that story contains a correction [washingtonpost.com] 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 [nymag.com] 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 [esquire.com], which Kelly did NOT address or debunk at that time.

        Then a couple months later when the New York Times published a book review [nytimes.com], 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. [cnn.com.de] 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

        • > Yep, and now that story contains a correction [washingtonpost.com] 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.

          That's great, but people don't check back on stories after they've read them. It's telling that they rush the story first and retract only when called on. The canonical "fake news" sites are Macedonian clickbait. It's not clear that anyone ever read or be

        • by bongey ( 974911 )

          The WaPo story STILL has the headline "Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility", which will be in every news feed. The PROPER and RESPONSIBLE news organization would RETRACT the ENTIRE STORY and PULL IT DOWN.

          • ...well, actually, maybe not. Maybe they got it right.

            Lets say I write a fake news story about how Trump actually had a brief affair with Hilary 10 years ago. My site gets loads of hits because:

            1) I'm 'first', and I've got an army of facebook friends all clicking and sharing my link
            2) If you google for the story, the BBC, the New York Times, CNN and all the rest don't come anywhere near as high in the rankings as I do - because they haven't written a story about it, and so their SEO is lower than mine on th

        • by djinn6 ( 1868030 )
          The point is that the majority of people still believe MSM is unbiased, and now they're going to believe everything not found in MSM is fake news. But the reality is that they're squarely in the pockets of Democrats, and they're just as ready to parrot any unsubstantiated piece of inflammatory turd as those fake news sites. Oh sure, they'll issue a correction later, after a day or two, when 98% of people had already saw and shared the wrong version. How many people do you think are sharing the correction?
      • Your comment contains statements that simply are not true. As somebody who obviously has been suckered in by fake news, I would hope you'd educate yourself to the point where you understand that legitimate news outlets that get a story wrong correct their errors publicly. Fake news sites exist for no reason but to deceive.

        Educate yourself, or at least have the common courtesy to STFU until you get your facts right.

      • Re:NYT is Fake News (Score:4, Informative)

        by LetterRip ( 30937 ) on Sunday January 01, 2017 @03:08PM (#53589229)

        Yesterday, Washington Post ran a story that the Russians hacked our power grid. What happened was a laptop, not connected to the grid, owned by the power company had malware on it. It wasn't even a valid news event, but they reported the Russians did it. Fake News.

        The way you hack a system that is off the internet (air gapped - as most of the hardware that is directly connected to major infrastructure such as refineries and power generation) is that you leave USB sticks with malware on them where a victim will find them.

        The victim then goes 'hmm I wonder what is on this USB stick' - plugs it into the computer, and the malware you put on the USB stick is transferred to the laptop.

        Then once the laptop is used by a technician on the air gapped hardware, the infrastructure gets infected.

        They 'hacked the power company', which is what the story claimed, they simply were unable to bridge the air gap because someone caught the infection in time.

        Since the malware bore the signature of Russian hackers, it wasn't a 'fake' news story, you were simply not well enough informed to understand what was going on.

    • by BlueStrat ( 756137 ) on Sunday January 01, 2017 @10:06AM (#53587955)

      Is using Facebook for news.

      I think the real problem is that, at least in the US, the government has spent the last 60-80 years dumbing-down the populace so the government could convince them of most anything, only to have others taking advantage of their gullibility as well, throwing a wrench into their Orwellian Newspeak/MiniTruth schemes.

      Strat

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      There doesn't seem to be any burden placed on Facebook to detect fake news, only to check reports and remove it within 24 hours.

      Seems quite reasonable.

    • by zifn4b ( 1040588 )

      Facebook is up against the same problem that took down Usenet - the tragedy of the commons

      So basically what you're saying is the human condition is responsible for the stupid shit that human beings do. That's like stating the obvious and there is no amount of government regulation, religion or anything else that we know of that will solve the problem and create a perfect utopia. We have the entire history of the human race as evidence. I'm tired of hearing people bitching and complaining about things they can't control and then try to scapegoat it on someone or something. Life isn't perfect

    • The future does not look so bright for Facebook as they will probably suffer the same fate as usenet.

      Sounds like a positive outcome to me. The world would be better off without the cancer that is Facebook.

      • No. Facebook keeps all of 'them' in one place where they can be ignored as a group.

        Can you imagine how much worse the rest of the net would be if all those morons were jumping up and down going 'look at me, look at me' everywhere but facebook?

  • As noted by Glenn Greenwald, WaPo posted fake news last week [theintercept.com]
    • WaPo is effectively an arm of the DNC at this point. It's to the point where the DNC can add donors to their private parties with a wink and a nod, despite the DNC's own lawyers forbidding them to add the party to the donor price sheets.

  • by DatbeDank ( 4580343 ) on Sunday January 01, 2017 @09:59AM (#53587933)
    Anything that makes Merkel and her disasterous policies look bad. Will facebook remove the reports of NYE sexual assaults too as fake news?
    • by elrous0 ( 869638 ) on Sunday January 01, 2017 @10:45AM (#53588065)

      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).

    • Merkels politics is not bad.

      I did not vote for her as she is in "the wrong party". But what she does is the "right thing".

      And unlike other politicians she has a PH.D in Physics, and is not a fucking lawyer or "retired" school teacher.

      • by djinn6 ( 1868030 )
        And someone else could've also done the "right thing" without calling her opponents racists and neo-Nazis, or trying to silence them.

        The choices are not just "kill the refugees" and "open border with Syria". With a bit of thought and rational policy making, she can save the refugees without endangering Germany or the EU. Her policy has every country in the EU struggling to support the influx, to the detriment of their own citizens. Brexit is the first, but if this keeps going, more will leave.

        And you
  • This could be fun (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cirby ( 2599 ) on Sunday January 01, 2017 @10:01AM (#53587943)

    Most of the people whining about this seem to have no idea that the "fake news" they know about is only a fraction of the problem.

    What's really funny is that about 90% of the things they like would fall under this umbrella, including a lot of content from the "real" media.

    The "Russians Hacked the Election" story, for example...

    The actual story is "the Russians hacked a couple of people at the Democratic Party (maybe) and embarrassed the hell out of them" - but the way it's being told, most of the Democrats you meet think there was actual nationwide vote tampering by Russian hacking. So far, the only vote tampering found was in Detroit, and it was done by hand, not by computer. Not to mention who won overwhelmingly in those precincts...

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by NotAPK ( 4529127 )

      "the Russians hacked a couple of people at the Democratic Party (maybe) and embarrassed the hell out of them"

      And even this has not been substantiated to the public by the US intelligence agencies.

      • "the Russians hacked a couple of people at the Democratic Party (maybe) and embarrassed the hell out of them"

        And even this has not been substantiated to the public by the US intelligence agencies.

        Totally agree, I haven't seen any evidence that the Russians found anything really embarrassing.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Wrath0fb0b ( 302444 )

      The actual story is "the Russians hacked a couple of people at the Democratic Party (maybe) and embarrassed the hell out of them"

      The actual actual story is that the Russians hacked some people at both parties [politico.com], but selectively chose to release only a selection of the ones stolen from the Democratic party.

      • Re:This could be fun (Score:4, Informative)

        by LynnwoodRooster ( 966895 ) on Sunday January 01, 2017 @11:36AM (#53588249) Journal

        The actual story is "the Russians hacked a couple of people at the Democratic Party (maybe) and embarrassed the hell out of them"

        The actual actual story is that the Russians hacked some people at both parties [politico.com], but selectively chose to release only a selection of the ones stolen from the Democratic party.

        You're spreading fake news. Your own source contradicts you: "An initial scan by POLITICO of the Republican-linked emails did not uncover any bombshell revelations". GOP e-mails were released, too - but there was nothing damning in it. Maybe, just maybe, the Democrats are dirtier than the GOP?

      • by guruevi ( 827432 )

        Trump is notorious for not using email because something could be tied back to him later on. I think plenty of Trumps escapades came out, CNN hacked a 15yo piece of tape that wasn't even part of any footage, just an accidental recording saved for over a decade for no good reason.

        The thing is that neither camps' dirt did anything to persuade voters to either side. Clinton could've killed a puppy on Times Square and gotten no more or less votes.

    • What's really funny is that about 90% of the things they like would fall under this umbrella, including a lot of content from the "real" media.

      I really wish people would stop with this narrative, because it's a complete exaggeration and it's ignorant of the real problems for ACTUAL "fake news."

      To be clear, I'm not claiming Germany's approach here is the right one, and there are people out there using "fake news" as an excuse to try to suppress legitimate content they don't agree with.

      However, there is ALSO a TON of actual fake news. I don't mean mildly exaggerated news or somewhat misleading headlines that are cleared up when you read the ful

      • by bongey ( 974911 )

        Legitimate news used to print retractions and pull down a bogus story when basic premise falls through. Instead now the story stays up for CLICK BAIT with a little tiny correction note usually at the very bottom , which many people won't even read. Rare they put a correction note at the beginning , but example the WaPo still has not changed their headline from their power grid story even though the entire premise is completely bogus. Only some anonymous sources and a democrat politicians are left for sour

      • by cirby ( 2599 )

        ABC News and Rathergate. Fake news, through and through. Dan Rather still claims the story is true, even though everyone knows it's a fraud.

        Dateline NBC and the exploding truck. They couldn't get the supposedly dangerous truck to catch fire, so they rigged it with an igniter for the camera. Yeah.

        NBC News and George Zimmerman. They took his 911 call and edited it to make him sound like a bigot, when it showed nothing of the sort. Read up on it, and wonder how much of what you "know" about that case is actual

  • by OneoFamillion ( 968420 ) on Sunday January 01, 2017 @10:05AM (#53587949)
    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.
  • by Bender Unit 22 ( 216955 ) on Sunday January 01, 2017 @10:25AM (#53588005) Journal

    Does it include the big media news sources that takes something that is a rumor and runs with it?
    Does it include the omission of fact? When it is not a lie, but it is also not the entire story but they omit something because it doesn't not fit their narrative?

    Or is it just those stories that shows the government doing a piss poor job of running the country?

  • Because on /.'s last century platform we can't post a €500,000.

    Oh look, € actually works. Most other stuff doesn't though.

    • The real story here is that the Euro continues to slide, it's now almost at parity with the dollar. When will it fall below parity? March, May? My guess is by July.
      • Well, the Euro is sliding, but so is everything else. The Pound, the Yen, the Canadian Dollar, the Argentine Peso, and Indian Rupees, etc.

        The US economy is doing well and it's really the Dollar's strength – against everything – as near as I can tell.

        The Euro started life at $0.85 or so. It wouldn't surprise me to see it go back under a dollar. The Pound almost reached parity back in 1985, maybe it will do it again. Brexit hasn't helped either the Euro or the Pound. Also Europe's austerity measur

  • Sure the Germans can determine that some news stories are "fake" and they can tell FB to remove them (or links to them I guess) from their site and they could technically do that I guess.

    Are ze Germans going to meticulously examine every website to see if they should be deleted or will they take a heavy-handed approach and just ban almost everything that aren't from approved sources?

    If they're going to carefully consider each case, anyone could set up a dozen websites while they're trying to figure out if o

    • The point is that a web site should take down "false news" when notified about the false news.

      So what again is your problem?

      • by lgw ( 121541 )

        If you know anything at all about DMCA takedowns, you know they're abused. If you know anything about history, you know governments consistently abuse any power given to them. If you can't see how giving the government the power to automatically delete any story it doesn't like will inevitably be abused, you're as naive as they come.

  • So how much is owed to Facebook (or whoever) each time someone misuses this to take down something they don't like? How about €500,000 per incident?
  • bipartisan? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jandar ( 304267 ) on Sunday January 01, 2017 @10:51AM (#53588093)

    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.

    • > What does "bipartisan support" mean in a system with 7 parties

      It's supported by the bi party, the party of bi people, of course.

      > Eo the US American journalists have no vocabulary to describe the reality outside of their country?

      This reminds me of the story last week about the federal government of France. Huh? Federalism in France? For a fraction of a second I thought you made the same mistake when you mentioned the federal government of Germany, but then I realized Germany is in fact a federatio

  • the Fake News spread because Facebook fired their Editorial dept to save money and replaced them with a cheap an weak algorithm. The fines would be a good way to force them back I suppose. That said something like this could be abused. At least in the States we don't make reporters reveal sources, so it'd be hard to prove 'fake' news. OTOH having foreign governments spreading propaganda and misinformation in your country is enough of a national security question that you can't just throw up your hands and d
    • by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

      OTOH having foreign governments spreading propaganda and misinformation in your country is enough of a national security question that you can't just throw up your hands and do nothing.

      How is it a national security issue? I hope you're not talking about the DNC and Clinton Foundation emails, because those are not propaganda and misinformation. Nobody even denied their authenticity.

    • > OTOH having foreign governments spreading propaganda and misinformation in your country
      > is enough of a national security question that you can't just throw up your hands and do nothing.

      So you're saying that the USSR should've nuked the USA because of Voice of America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] and Radio Free Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] shortwave broadcasts?

  • could also be interpreted as a faked news by some at that time: http://www.luther.de/en/95thes... [luther.de]

    Nevertheless, Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of All Saints' Church in Wittenberg, Germany, on 31 October 1517. And it changed the world.
  • It's not fake news, it's just the death of any media outlet that game a damn about checking facts, as well as the death of people who cared to go out of their way for a media outlet that did so. There used to be a thing called journalistic integrity but it comes at a cost and no one wants to pay. The biggest problem is, it was doing a lot to hold back the days of Idiocracy. Sadly, those days are now well upon us.
  • "Lawmakers in the country are reportedly hoping it will prevent Russia from interfering in Germany's elections next year."

    Lol, good luck with that.

    Russia doesn't give a shit if German newspapers get fined and the newspapers don't have the staff, time, or inclination to check every story.

  • by John Jorsett ( 171560 ) on Sunday January 01, 2017 @12:53PM (#53588577)
    Facebook and other affected social networks would have to create "in-country offices focused on responding to takedown demands," the report says.

    Orwell only got the timeframe wrong, and the fact that it'll be a public-private partnership instead of purely governmental.
  • The "Russia hacked the U.S. election" headline, in contrast with "some Russians hacked the DNC and we don't know who leaked to Wikileaks", is the biggest case of fake news out there and almost no one is talking about it [theintercept.com]. Because of this type of deceitful headline half of Clinton's voters believe that the Russian government hacked the vote tallies [yougov.com], even tough there is no indication of that [youtube.com] and no officials are actually claiming.

  • Who decides what's 'fake' news? The ministry of truth?

  • If this holds up it's going to be a huge mess, especially for fox and beitbart.
  • Date: June 17, 1972

    The government office of News Verification and Purity has determined that your publication, The Washington Post, is responsible for the fake news article entitled "5 Held in Plot to Bug Democrats' Office Here" [washingtonpost.com] is false to fact and an irresponsible use of the public trust. You are herein DIRECTED and ORDERED to remove said post and issue a retraction within 24 hours or face fines and criminal penalties.

    Your immediate compliance is required as a matter of law.

    Regards,
    Richard M. Ni

The unfacts, did we have them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude.

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