The "Fake News" Censorship Industry

by Robbie Travers • January 21, 2017 at 5:00 am

Name a single person or organisation you trust to control your speech. Whom would you trust to control what you can read, or make decisions on what is true and what is false for you? Whom do you trust to police what you think?
The German government thinks it knows exactly who should be the arbiter of truth and what articles you should be allowed to post. Itself!
This would lead to a monopolisation of the media industry. One or two large platforms would dominate the public debate; fringe voices would be ignored or cast aside.
Who is to police the police? Facebook, caught out, already had to dismiss those compiling their trending stories, when it was revealed that they had a runaway political bias and were routinely suppressing (conservative) material with which they did not agree.
The whole censorship industry is open to abuse; presumably, that is what censorship is for in the first place.

Name a single person or organisation you trust to control your speech. Whom would you trust to control what you can read, or make decisions on what is true and what is false for you? Whom do you trust to police what you think?

The German government thinks it knows exactly who should be the arbiter of truth and what articles you should be allowed to post. Itself!

After a bill was proposed by German lawmakers, which threatened fines of up to 500,000 euros ($522,000) for publishing "fake news," Facebook decided to use an organisation called Correctiv, described as a German fact-checking non-profit organisation, to decide whether reported stories are "real" or "fake."

This system would then encourage individual Facebook users to report other users' posts to Correctiv. Facebook would then have Correctiv label any of the articles "fake news," as they see fit.