Meanwhile, in Germany, a landmark social media bill

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Soham321
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Meanwhile, in Germany, a landmark social media bill

Post by Soham321 » Sat Apr 08, 2017 5:26 am

A very welcome development. Fake news has become a menace particularly with respect to elections and whipping up tendentious propaganda.

BERLIN — Germany officially unveiled a landmark social-media bill Wednesday that could quickly turn this nation into a test case in the effort to combat the spread of fake news and hate speech in the West.

The highly anticipated draft bill is also highly contentious, with critics denouncing it as a curb on free speech. If passed, as now appears likely, 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 50 million euros ($53 million).

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet agreed on the draft bill Wednesday, giving it a high chance of approval in the German Parliament before national elections in September. In effect, the move is Germany’s response to a barrage of fake news during last year’s elections in the United States, with officials seeking to prevent a similar onslaught here.

Already, a few fake news reports have emerged in Germany. One falsely alleged that a German girl of Russian descent was raped last year by asylum seekers. Repeated by high-level Russian officials, the reports seemed aimed at Merkel’s open-door policy for refugees.

Merkel is now involved in a strenuous campaign 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 he would press for similar measures across the European Union.

A number of European countries have also sought to counter the fake-news scourge. The Czech Republic recently inaugurated a special unit charged with 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.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/eu ... story.html

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Question: could this law have any impact on wikipedia?

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Flip Flopped
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Re: Meanwhile, in Germany, a landmark social media bill

Post by Flip Flopped » Sat Apr 08, 2017 4:00 pm

If Wikipedia editors were using fake news stories to incite hate, then it would seem this potential legislation might apply to it. Have there been incidents of that?

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Re: Meanwhile, in Germany, a landmark social media bill

Post by Soham321 » Sat Apr 08, 2017 4:47 pm

Flip Flopped wrote:If Wikipedia editors were using fake news stories to incite hate, then it would seem this potential legislation might apply to it. Have there been incidents of that?


there are many examples of this. here are a few:

(a) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_ ... pedia_hoax

(b) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... y_incident

(c) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jar%27Edo_Wens_hoax

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My favorite example of this is:

A woman opens an old steamer trunk and discovers tantalizing clues that a long-dead relative may actually have been a serial killer, stalking the streets of New York in the closing years of the nineteenth century. A beer enthusiast is presented by his neighbor with the original recipe for Brown's Ale, salvaged decades before from the wreckage of the old brewery--the very building where the Star-Spangled Banner was sewn in 1813. A student buys a sandwich called the Last American Pirate and unearths the long-forgotten tale of Edward Owens, who terrorized the Chesapeake Bay in the 1870s.

These stories have two things in common. They are all tailor-made for viral success on the internet. And they are all lies.

Each tale was carefully fabricated by undergraduates at George Mason University who were enrolled in T. Mills Kelly's course, Lying About the Past. Their escapades not only went unpunished, they were actually encouraged by their professor. Four years ago, students created a Wikipedia page detailing the exploits of Edward Owens, successfully fooling Wikipedia's community of editors...

The first time Kelly taught the course, in 2008, his students confected the life of Edward Owens, mixing together actual lives and events with brazen fabrications. They created YouTube videos, interviewed experts, scanned and transcribed primary documents, and built a Wikipedia page to honor Owens' memory. The romantic tale of a pirate plying his trade in the Chesapeake struck a chord, and quickly landed on USA Today's pop culture blog. When Kelly announced the hoax at the end of the semester, some were amused, applauding his pedagogical innovations. Many others were livid.

Critics decried the creation of a fake Wikipedia page as digital vandalism. "Things like that really, really, really annoy me," fumed founder Jimmy Wales, comparing it to dumping trash in the streets to test the willingness of a community to keep it clean. But the indignation may, in part, have been compounded by the weaknesses the project exposed. Wikipedia operates on a presumption of good will. Determined contributors, from public relations firms to activists to pranksters, often exploit that, inserting information they would like displayed. The sprawling scale of Wikipedia, with nearly four million English-language entries, ensures that even if overall quality remains high, many such efforts will prove successful.


https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/ ... it/257134/

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Here is the professor's rationale for why he designed such a course:

What happens when you teach students how to lie? Answer: they become better historians.

More than a decade ago, back in the days of Web 0.5, a student of mine submitted a generally well-written essay on “Ante Pavelić, Great Hero of the Croatian Nation.” Now, if you know your history of World War II, you may remember Pavelić as the leader of the Croatian Ustaše government that was perhaps the most vicious of the puppet regimes aligned with Nazi Germany.

How, I wondered, had she decided that Pavelić was such a great hero?

The solution lay in her sources. All of the major citations in the paper were drawn from Croatian nationalist websites that lauded Pavelić for his supposed achievements on behalf of the nation and denied any role he had in the atrocities committed by his regime – some denying the atrocities had occurred at all.

When I pointed my student to histories of the period written by historians whose work focused on the history of Yugoslavia, she was surprised to find many significant differences between what she found on those websites and what she found in the published histories. We were then able to have a very good conversation about the critical assessment of sources – an essential conversation for any budding historian.


https://theconversation.com/teaching-st ... oaxes-8653

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Re: Meanwhile, in Germany, a landmark social media bill

Post by Flip Flopped » Sat Apr 08, 2017 5:19 pm

Jar'Edo Wens was not based on any "fake news" article and was not inciting any form of hatred. It was admittedly biased against Australian Aboriginal religion but unless any Australian Aboriginal was targeted based on it then there isn't the faintest relationship to the potential new law.

Since you included such a stupid link as an example I won't even look at your other purported examples because you are either self-deluded or full of shit.

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Re: Meanwhile, in Germany, a landmark social media bill

Post by Soham321 » Sat Apr 08, 2017 5:25 pm

Flip Flopped wrote:Jar'Edo Wens was not based on any "fake news" article and was not inciting any form of hatred. It was admittedly biased against Australian Aboriginal religion but unless any Australian Aboriginal was targeted based on it then there isn't the fainted relationship to the potential new law.

Since you included such a stupid link as an example I won't even look at your other purported examples because you are either self-deluded or full of shit.


is it appropriate for you to fly off the handle for a relatively innocuous post?Are you unwell? I did not say it was inciting hatred, i gave it as an example of fake news. And these are the categories mentioned in its WP article:

"2005 hoaxes", "Internet hoaxes", and "Wikipedia hoaxes"

I clarified that my favorite example was of the professor who designed an entire course to get his students to make fake entries on wikipedia (and presumably other sites).

As I understand, the german law deals with the problem of fake news, whether or not such fake news is an instance of hate speech or not.

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Re: Meanwhile, in Germany, a landmark social media bill

Post by Flip Flopped » Sat Apr 08, 2017 5:35 pm

Soham321 wrote:A very welcome development. Fake news has become a menace particularly with respect to elections and whipping up tendentious propaganda.

[i]BERLIN — Germany officially unveiled a landmark social-media bill Wednesday that could quickly turn this nation into a test case in the effort to combat the spread of fake news and hate speech in the West.

The highly anticipated draft bill is also highly contentious, with critics denouncing it as a curb on free speech. If passed, as now appears likely, 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 50 million euros ($53 million).

<snip>

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Question: could this law have any impact on wikipedia?
I bolded the relevant part of the proposed legislation.

Yes, I can tell you that you're full of shit when you are. This forum doesn't have a rule that makes everyone be uber-polite.

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Re: Meanwhile, in Germany, a landmark social media bill

Post by Soham321 » Sat Apr 08, 2017 5:47 pm

Flip Flopped wrote:
Soham321 wrote:A very welcome development. Fake news has become a menace particularly with respect to elections and whipping up tendentious propaganda.

[i]BERLIN — Germany officially unveiled a landmark social-media bill Wednesday that could quickly turn this nation into a test case in the effort to combat the spread of fake news and hate speech in the West.

The highly anticipated draft bill is also highly contentious, with critics denouncing it as a curb on free speech. If passed, as now appears likely, 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 50 million euros ($53 million).

<snip>

----
Question: could this law have any impact on wikipedia?
I bolded the relevant part of the proposed legislation.

Yes, I can tell you that you're full of shit when you are. This forum doesn't have a rule that makes everyone be uber-polite.


The words you yourself have highlighted indicate that this is not just about hate speech, but about "other criminal content" as well. It is in poor taste for a moderator of a forum to start abusing another forum member, particularly when there is no good reason to do so. How is your behavior any different from that of Floquenbeam?

With what authority can WP critics criticize WP Admins when our own leaders refuse to behave in an exemplary manner?

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Re: Meanwhile, in Germany, a landmark social media bill

Post by Flip Flopped » Sat Apr 08, 2017 6:23 pm

Soham321 wrote:
Flip Flopped wrote:
Soham321 wrote:A very welcome development. Fake news has become a menace particularly with respect to elections and whipping up tendentious propaganda.

[i]BERLIN — Germany officially unveiled a landmark social-media bill Wednesday that could quickly turn this nation into a test case in the effort to combat the spread of fake news and hate speech in the West.

The highly anticipated draft bill is also highly contentious, with critics denouncing it as a curb on free speech. If passed, as now appears likely, 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 50 million euros ($53 million).

<snip>

----
Question: could this law have any impact on wikipedia?
I bolded the relevant part of the proposed legislation.

Yes, I can tell you that you're full of shit when you are. This forum doesn't have a rule that makes everyone be uber-polite.


The words you yourself have highlighted indicate that this is not just about hate speech, but about "other criminal content" as well. It is in poor taste for a moderator of a forum to start abusing another forum member, particularly when there is no good reason to do so. How is your behavior any different from that of Floquenbeam?

With what authority can WP critics criticize WP Admins when our own leaders refuse to behave in an exemplary manner?
There was no criminal content in the Jar'Edo Wens Wikipedia hoax.

You should take your complaint up the chain.

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Re: Meanwhile, in Germany, a landmark social media bill

Post by Soham321 » Sat Apr 08, 2017 6:28 pm

Flip Flopped wrote:
Soham321 wrote:
Flip Flopped wrote:
Yes, I can tell you that you're full of shit when you are. This forum doesn't have a rule that makes everyone be uber-polite.


The words you yourself have highlighted indicate that this is not just about hate speech, but about "other criminal content" as well. It is in poor taste for a moderator of a forum to start abusing another forum member, particularly when there is no good reason to do so. How is your behavior any different from that of Floquenbeam?

With what authority can WP critics criticize WP Admins when our own leaders refuse to behave in an exemplary manner?
There was no criminal content in the Jar'Edo Wens Wikipedia hoax.

You should take your complaint up the chain.


"other criminal content" is a broad term. Earlier in this thread, you wrote "It was admittedly biased against Australian Aboriginal religion but unless any Australian Aboriginal was targeted based on it then there isn't the faintest relationship to the potential new law." In other words you yourself are not certain of whether this hoax would be an instance of "other criminal content".

Bottomline is that If you insist on getting into a shit flinging contest with me here (and note that i stopped posting on PB WR only because of your excessive censorship about which i complained publicly) then i am happy to oblige you, but you'll have to resign as a moderator on this forum first. You can't have it both ways. Either abuse me as an ordinary forum member, or retain your Moderator responsibilities. You can't do both.

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Re: Meanwhile, in Germany, a landmark social media bill

Post by Flip Flopped » Sat Apr 08, 2017 6:34 pm

Soham321 wrote:
Flip Flopped wrote:There was no criminal content in the Jar'Edo Wens Wikipedia hoax.

You should take your complaint up the chain.
"other criminal content" is a broad term. Earlier in this thread, you wrote "It was admittedly biased against Australian Aboriginal religion but unless any Australian Aboriginal was targeted based on it then there isn't the faintest relationship to the potential new law." In other words you yourself are not certain of whether this hoax would be an instance of "other criminal content".

Bottomline is that If you insist on getting into a shit flinging contest with me here (and note that i stopped posting on PB WR only because of your excessive censorship about which i complained publicly) then i am happy to oblige you, but you'll have to resign as a moderator on this forum first. You can't have it both ways. Either abuse me as an ordinary forum member, or retain your Moderator responsibilities. You can't do both.
The Jar'Edo Wens hoax did not involve criminal content in any way. That is clear.

Take your complaint up with the others. The rules here specify that there may be disturbing content.

You complained over on the other forum because you felt that forum had to host your massage video that showed full frontal male nudity. That content didn't fit that forum and the other staff agreed without hesitation.

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