Germany’s fight against “fake news”.

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.

In the name of combating harms from false news, the German government next year will consider the bill, which has bipartisan support, that will allow both official and private complainants to flag content that is considered “fake news”.

German lawmakers believe this bill will help tackle the possibility of Russia meddling in Parliamentary elections scheduled for next year. This follows the allegations that the Kremlin was behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee that led to the leak of thousands of emails by key aides to Hillary Clinton.

What’s possinly going on here, is that the German government is afraid that the public will vote to replace the current ruling party due to the horrible economic conditions experienced by the people.

Instead, by preventing any dissenting news articles from appearing in Facebook feeds, by calling them “fake” and forcing them to be taken down within 24 hours, the German government hopes to control the dialogue of the media. Even if they err on the side of claiming legitimate news articles as being fake, the threat of a $1/2 million dollars per article fine will force Facebook to take EVERY article down that is deemed fake, even if later on those articles turn out to not be fake.

This is setting a dangerous precedent for “freedom of the press” as many dissenting news articles in the past, such as claiming no “weapons of mass destruction” existed in Iraq, for example, would have been labeled “fake news” back then and taken down.

Source: Germany Considers Fining Facebook $522,000 Per Fake News Item | Heat Street