Fake news focus of Germans' bill

Onus put on social media sites

BERLIN -- Germany officially unveiled a social media bill Wednesday that aims to turn the country into a test case to combat the spread of fake news and hate speech in the West.

The highly anticipated draft bill, several months in the making, is also highly contentious, with critics denouncing it as a curb on free speech. If passed into law, the measure would compel large outlets such as Facebook and Twitter to rapidly remove fake news that incites hate, as well as other "criminal" content, or face fines as high as $53 million.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's Cabinet agreed on the draft bill Wednesday, a step toward approval in the German parliament before national elections in September. The move amounts to a direct response to the barrage of fake news during last year's elections in the United States, as German officials seek to prevent a similar onslaught in their country.

Already, a few fake news reports have emerged in Germany, including one falsely alleging a rape last year of a German girl of Russian descent by asylum seekers. Repeated by high-level Russian officials, the reports seemed aimed at Merkel's open-door policy for refugees.

Merkel is campaigning hard for a fourth term in office.

"The providers of social networks are responsible when their platforms are misused to spread hate crime or illegal false news," German Justice Minister Heiko Maas said in a statement.

The proposed law would apply only within German borders. But Maas said Wednesday that he would press for similar measures to be adopted across the 28-member European Union.

A number of European countries also have sought to counter the fake news scourge, with the Czech Republic recently inaugurating a special unit in charge of denouncing false reports. Should the German measure become law, however, experts say it would amount to the boldest step yet by a major Western nation to control social media content. Depending on how obviously false or illegal a post is, companies would have as little as 24 hours to remove it.

In addition to fake news and hate speech, the draft bill would target posts seen as inciting terrorism or spreading child pornography. Officials have cited a surge of hate speech across the Internet as a major factor behind in the rise of far-right violence in Germany, including a wave of arson at refugee centers and attacks on police officers.

"Germany considers itself a pioneer," said Markus Beckedahl, a German Internet activist and Berlin-based blogger. "It's a solo effort ... but the European Commission will certainly watch closely what Germany is doing."

Yet the broad nature of the bill prompted critics to immediately call it an overreach that runs the risk of becoming censorship. Stephan Scherzer, chairman of the Association of German Magazine Publishers, said the measure could turn big social media companies into "private opinion police."

Green Party politician Renate Kunast told public broadcaster ARD that the bill could lead to "a sharp limitation of freedom of speech, because there will only be deleting, deleting, deleting."

One of the companies most affected by the bill is Facebook, which has sought to sidestep such laws by taking voluntary measures to curb the spread of fake news. The company echoed concerns that the bill would wrongly foist upon corporations a level of decision-making on the legality of content that should instead reside with German courts.

"We work very hard to remove illegal content from our platform and are determined to work with others to solve this problem," the company said in a statement. "As experts have pointed out, this legislation would force private companies rather than the courts to become the judges of what is illegal in Germany."

But German officials argue that social media companies are simply not acting fast enough to deal with damaging posts. Maas, for instance, cited statistics showing that Facebook has rapidly deleted only 39 percent of the criminal content it was notified about, while Twitter acted fast to delete content cited in only 1 out of 100 user complaints.

Rather than setting a new standard, officials also say they are simply forcing social media outlets to comply with existing laws governing hate speech and incitement in Germany. Incitement and defamation laws in Germany are far broader than in the United States; for instance, laws on the books forbid slandering German leaders and make denial of the Holocaust a crime.

"There must be just as little room for illegal hate speech on social networks as there is on the street," Maas said. "We owe it to the victims of hate crimes to enforce this better."

A Section on 04/06/2017

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