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Germany has followed through on its proposal to make social networks remove slanderous hate speech and fake news or face massive fines.
The nation's Bundesministerium der Justiz und für Verbraucherschutz (Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection) has announced that cabinet approved a plan to force social network operators to create a complaints mechanism allowing members of the public to report content that online translate-o-tronic services categorise as "insults, libel, slander, public prosecutions, crimes, and threats."
The Bill approved by Cabinet proposes that social networks be required to establish complaints officer who is subject to local law and gets the job of removing obviously criminal content 24 hours after receiving a complaint. A seven-day deadline will apply to content that's not immediately identifiable as infringing. Social networks will also be required to inform complainants of the outcome of their takedown requests and to provide quarterly summaries of their activities.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday April 08 2017, @12:13PM (3 children)
What in "insults, libel, slander, public prosecutions, crimes, and threats." actually covers Fake news?
Seems like lies are still allowed, except when they are insults, libel, slander or public prosecutions (crimes/threats are not fake news... I hope).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 08 2017, @02:58PM
What in "insults, libel, slander, public prosecutions, crimes, and threats." actually covers Fake news?
You're questioning the ambiguity? That's a crime!
Maybe they mean anything that is fake and contains "insults, libel, slander, public prosecutions, crimes, and threats."?
This whole thing sounds like it's ripe for abuse and will result in a lot of takedowns/removals to err on the side of caution but they'll eventually get restored. This is perfect for trying to get a real story out of the news until things settle down and the next distraction comes along.
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Saturday April 08 2017, @03:11PM (1 child)
Well, if you look at the actual proposed law, you'll see it's does not define what's legal and what not. It just says that if something is illegal to post, then any social network must delete it when notified about it, and there have to be ways to report illegal content that actually work, and they have to report about their deletion policies and how much they delete. Oh, and they have to have someone employed who's responsible for all this.
So if something is illegal to post after passing this law, it already was illegal to post it before passing this law. And if you want to make it legal to post specific content that's currently illegal, you don't have to fight this law, but instead you have to fight whatever law it is that currently make that specific content illegal.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday April 08 2017, @03:41PM
Or one could just wipe out the capability for the state to meddle in the communication between citizens.
No need to fight anything like the opponent intended.