I trust the German government's ability to declare an objective truth that we can all use to make decisions a lot more than I trust Mark Zuckerberg, at this point. Only one of these entities is accountable to anyone. Voting may be flawed but it's a lot better than Mark Zuckerberg effectively having absolute say over what is fact and what is not.
Democratic society relies on us being able to agree about basic facts. The press used to do that for us, however imperfectly. Google and Facebook have taken all their revenues and also are major conduits of news, and yet have corrupted this function of the press. If they want the revenues they should accept the responsibility too.
> and yet have corrupted this function of the press
Given the quality of "mainstream" press recently, I don't really see how they corrupted it, unless you mean the corruption then spread onto everyone. Ad revenue in general, on the other hand, is something I'd blame for much of the corruption.
That said, we're talking only about broad criteria for news stories - there's no way Zuckerberg or German government could do fine judgement on news stories. Asking for that is opening yourself to be effectively DDoSed by sheer volume of publications these days. This fine itself seems less like censorship, and more like wanting the ability to coerce Facebook in other areas by threatening them with fake news fines.
> Given the quality of "mainstream" press recently, I don't really see how they corrupted it, unless you mean the corruption then spread onto everyone. Ad revenue in general, on the other hand, is something I'd blame for much of the corruption.
It's gotten significantly worse over the last 10-20 years, at the same time as the googles and facebooks of this world grew. I do meant that the corruption has in fact spread to everyone.
I trust the German government's ability to declare an objective truth that we can all use to make decisions a lot more than I trust Mark Zuckerberg, at this point.
You have to trust someone to establish basic facts about things you didn't personally witness, if you want to live in society with other humans and be able to make decisions about how to live together.
And as TeMPOral points out, I'm not saying I trust them with my life - but I do trust them more as an arbiter of factual reality.
After all, one of them is a democratically elected institution with strong rules about accountability and transparency. The other is a private company ruled absolutely by one individual and with a board member who's on the record saying he doesn't believe democracy is compatible with freedom.
Democratic society relies on us being able to agree about basic facts. The press used to do that for us, however imperfectly. Google and Facebook have taken all their revenues and also are major conduits of news, and yet have corrupted this function of the press. If they want the revenues they should accept the responsibility too.