Earlier this week, Facebook said that it would be partnering
with fact-checking sites like Snopes to help weed out the fake news that has
been plaguing the site in recent years. But it seems that Germany is not
confident that self-regulation will be enough.
The chairman of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, Thomas
Oppermann, has suggested a new law that would require companies like Facebook
to set up an office in the country that would deal with fake news and hate
speech at all hours of the day. According to English-language version of the
German news site Deutsche Welle, German legislators are considering whether to
institute a policy that if Facebook’s local office did not delete the news item
or hate speech within 24 hours, the social network could expect a fine of
€500,000 euros ($522,575) per item.
The move is partly in response to fears that fake news posts
could have an affect on the German parliamentary elections taking place in
2017, according to the Financial Times. Facebook has repeatedly said since the
Nov. 8 election of Donald Trump in the US that fake news on its site, which has
roughly 180 million users in the US and Canada, could not have affected the
election. Facebook’s insistence that it’s not a media company, even though it’s
suspended foreign news outlets and blocked iconic war photographs in recent
months, came at a time when it was revealed that the 20 highest-performing fake
news stories outperformed the 20 most-read news stories from legitimate news
outlets.
The ruling coalition in Germany, which includes the
Christian Democratic Union, chancellor Angela Merkel’s party, has said that it
wants to have laws in the books mitigating the spread of fake news and hate
speech before the 2017 election, according to Deutsche Welle.
Compiled by Mike Murphy
Mike Murphy is a reporter at Quartz, covering technology. He
likes to write about the future, and how we'll get there from today's
technology. He likes to think of his reporting subjects as "machines with
brains"—whether he's talking about robots, drones, artificial
intelligence, or self-driving cars. He graduated from the Medill School of
Journalism at Northwestern and the University of Pennsylvania.
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