Facebook forced by penal threat to test fake news filtering system in Germany

In December, German lawmakers announced plans to introduce a bill that would fine Facebook €500,000 (or about $535,000) for failure to  remove fake news posts within 24 hours. The Financial Times yesterday reported that the company would be testing its fake news filtering system in Germany.

The social network announced in December that it was building a way for users to report fake news on the site and now it seemed that Germany would be one of the first places to try it out. In an email to Gizmodo, the company said it had started testing a similar filter in the US a month ago.

There was no communication from Facebook as to whether the feature had been introduced in reaction to the potential new German law, but the timing was definitely interesting, they said.

It also demonstrated the incredible power the government had, to stop the spread of misinformation on social media. A Facebook spokesperson told Gizmodo, ''When we launched this in the US we said that we would expand the pilot into other countries over time. We've listened to our community and begun talks with other global partners, and the readiness of German partners allows us to begin testing in Germany. We expect to announce efforts in additional countries soon.''

"We are working very carefully on a solution to this problem. Our efforts are focused on the distribution of unique false alarms generated by spammers. We have also used third parties to provide objective, unbiased reviews of news," Facebook said in a statement.

Facebook had tied up with Correctiv, a nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative journalism collective, to serve as a third-party fact checker and review flagged material found on its platforms.

"Fake news - especially on Facebook - is already one of the major threats of our society. That is clear. We fear that these threats will become even more massive in the coming months, whether it is the NRW election or the election of the next Bundestag in autumn," Correctiv said in a statement.