Facebook has announced to roll out fake new offensive in Germany, as the country enters parliamentary election year.
Recently, Facebook faced criticism for failing to stop fake news floating on its platform during US elections. The social giant has also been criticized in Germany for an insufficient response to hate speech. Many German politicians and experts have now warned that foreign nations and populist parties could use fake news to influence parliamentary elections in the country. Angela Merkel, chancellor, has warned that Russia could “play a role in the election campaign”.
Last month, the German government revealed its plan to introduce a law to impose fines of up to €500,000 on Facebook for distributing fake news.
Heiko Maas, Germany’s justice minister, in an interview with Welt Am Sonntag, warned that fake news poses a danger to German’s culture of debate.
“But social networks also have a duty,” he said. “It can’t be in Facebook’s interest that its platform is misused in order to spread lies and hate campaigns. Criminal content should be deleted immediately once it has been reported. And it must be easier for users to report fake news.”
Facebook Germany, in a blog post on its website said: “It’s important to us that the reports and news posted on Facebook are reliable.”
Facebook’s latest decision has come just days after its announcement of starting a “Journalism Project” to increase credibility of the information it circulates.
The new initiative from Facebook Germany would target “unambiguously wrong reports” being posted and shared on its platform. Users would be able to flag suspected fake news. Stories flagged as fake would be sent to independent fact-checking organizations, and if the story is found to be fake, it will be flagged as disputed and would get display warning. The social networking site would also cut off advertising revenue to fake news sites posting false stories.
“We think that independent and transparent fact-checking can be a powerful instrument for journalism,” Facebook said.
The social giant also announced partnership with nonprofit investigative media group Correctiv for fact-checking of news stories. A Facebook spokesman revealed that the company is already in talks with German media and publishing groups and it is expected that more partners would come on board.
“Our focus is on Germany right now but we’re certainly thinking through what countries will unveil next,” he said.
About Facebook
Facebook, headquartered in Menlo Park, California, U.S., is the largest social networking website in the world. The Facebook website was launched in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard College students Andrew McCollum, Eduardo Saverin, Chris Hughes, and Dustin Moskovitz. Initially, the websites membership was limited to Harvard students, but it was later expanded to include higher education institutions in the Boston area, the Ivy League schools, and Stanford University. Since 2006, anyone aged 13 or above can register on the website.
By late 2007, there were 100,000 business pages on Facebook. These pages were created by companies to promote themselves and attract customers. On October 24, 2007, Microsoft revealed to have purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240 million. Once year later, Facebook announced its plan to set up its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.
In July 2010, the company announced to have touched the milestone of 500 million users, making it the world’s largest online social network at the time. At that time, almost half of the Facebook users were using the site daily, for an average of 34 minutes (according to the company’s data).
According to SecondMarket Inc., Facebook’s value in November 2010 was $41 billion, making it the third largest American web company after Google and Amazon.
The initial public offering of Facebook was held in February 2012. Three months later, the company started selling stock to the public, and reached an original peak market capitalization of $104 billion. As of March 31, 2016, the social network had over 1.65 billion monthly active users, and it is now also the world’s most popular social networking site based on the number of active user accounts.
