The EU’s position of fining companies if people lie on social media is bumping into the messy reality that no one knows what the truth is in the middle of a war.
If they actually follow through on fines, the only reasonable solution would be to block anyone from talking about Israel & Hamas. Even a sitting US congressperson has posted images from a different event claiming they were from Gaza over the past week.
You can’t trust any breaking news from a war zone.
@carnage4life I dont expect this to be enforced as a zero misinformstion policy but more like say banks are regulated when it comes to anti moneylaundering. Companies get fined if they dont have the systems and processes in place to detect and remove misinformation or if the systems and processes fail in major ways. Its just going to be the cost of doing thus business, companies will also balance the tradeoffs in their interest (same with banks, they regularly get non-material fines for AML failures and also understand that they make more money to allow a bit of money laundering and paying the fines but that too much money laundering is definitey not worth the risk - hence they hire 1000s of people in auditing, compliance and regulatory departments).
I expect social networks to come up with a similar middle-ground.
@chkuendig@carnage4life if that's the case then the EU and eurozone should forget about nurturing European social media brands due to the regulatory burden as they sometimes claim these laws should in theory do.
@absamma@carnage4life Well, the refulations dont apply until a company has scale, so maybe that will advantage newcomers. But I wouldnt count on that working… Its probably more a carve out for newspaper comment sections etc (and I guess Mastodon admins 😊)
@carnage4life you can't prevent everyone from posting fake news, true, but you can identify sources of viral claims that turn out to be fake news, and i would guess these do a majority of the harm, hammering down on that would certainly massively improve the situation.
@tshirtman@carnage4life Exactly. The issue is with platforms that don't want to drop any kind of juicy engagement for the sake of Ad revenues.
They willingly lower the barrier for the spread of shitty, debunked information and someone* has to do something about it, otherwise why are we all screaming that we want someone to do something about that?
@tshirtman@carnage4life You would only be able to determine that viral claims were fake well after the fact, as “debunking” itself produces false positives, a great number of times even intentionally.
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