Can a democratic country outlaw fake news? France is about to find out, after French President Emmanuel Macron ordered a law to quash false information disseminated around electoral campaigns.
Criticism is pouring in from media advocates, tech experts and Kremlin-backed international broadcaster RT, who have said that the law smacks of authoritarianism, would be impossible to enforce and are sure to backfire.
Macron’s stance “could be just the beginning of actually censoring freedom of speech. We believe it is a very dangerous situation,” said Xenia Fedorova, the director of RT’s newly launched French-language channel.
Yet in a world where a falsehoods can reach billions instantaneously and political manipulation is increasingly sophisticated, Macron has argued that something must be done.
A US Congress report by the US Democratic Party released on Thursday said that Russia has undertaken efforts to undermine politics in 19 European countries since 2016, using cyberattacks, disinformation, clandestine social media operations, financing of fringe political groups and, in extreme cases, assassination attempts.
Macron’s own campaign suffered a big hacking attack last year, although the government later said it found no proof of Russian involvement.
Propaganda and disinformation are not new or unique to Russia.
Author and technology historian Edward Tenner has said that fake news is as old as the myth of George Washington’s cherry tree — an enduring, but untrue legend about the first US president.
While democracies usually rely on defamation and libel laws to combat false publications, Macron wants more.
In a New Year’s speech to journalists, he said he is ordering a new “legal arsenal’’ that would oblige news Web sites to reveal who owns them and where their money comes from.
It could cap the money allowed for content seen as aimed at swaying an election and allow emergency legal action to block Web sites. The French broadcast regulator’s power would expand to allow it to suspend media seen as trying to destabilize a vote, notably those “controlled or influenced by foreign powers.”
That probably refers to outlets such as RT, which was seen as favoring National Front presidential candidate Marine Le Pen in last year’s French election and which many consider a tool of the Russian government and Sputnik, another Russian-backed outlet that drew attention for reporting a rumor during the French presidential campaign that Macron was having a gay affair.
He denied it and beat Le Pen anyway, but never forgot.
Fedorova said RT is being unfairly targeted.
Speaking from RT’s gleaming French studios on the banks of the Seine River, she said she struggled to get permits to open in France and her journalists are routinely barred from the Elysee Palace after Macron last year accused RT and Sputnik of being “organs” of Russian influence.
RT France’s coverage appears broadly similar to other French networks, with a slightly greater emphasis on street violence and migrants. The biggest difference: its extensive coverage of Syria, which stresses the views of the Russian and Syrian governments.
“RT stands for giving the floor, the platform to different opinions, and I personally believe that diversity of voices is absolutely necessary in order to have the big picture,” said Fedorova, who said the station will be watching Macron’s plan closely.
Media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is also watching closely. It has decried fake news as undermining journalists who work hard to uncover wrongdoing and verify information, but the group is wary of Macron’s order.
“We are not opposed to the principle of a law against fake news, but the point is to be able to write a law without endangering the freedom to reveal things,” RSF director-general Christophe Deloire said.
“Probably our democracies have to be defended in front of the fake news wave,” he said, but not “with the ways that despotic countries use.”
RSF is working with partners on a potential certification system that could classify news sources according to their verification methods, transparency about financing and other criteria and leave it up to the public to decide what to believe.
As the French government prepares its bill, it will be learning lessons from a German law cracking down on hate speech on social networks that went into effect this month. Some fear that legitimate posts by satirists or journalists are being accidentally caught up in the dragnet.
Shutting down Web sites could also backfire by calling more attention to them.
“The only long-term solution for the fake news problem is a more sophisticated public,” Tenner said.
“Sophisticated manipulators of facts will always find a way around whatever regulations are in place,” such as creating a front company to sponsor a Web site or writing “something that is misleading and inflammatory that is factually true,” he said.
Information Technology and Innovation Foundation vice president Daniel Castro outlined another problem.
“People like fake news. It reinforces their beliefs,” he said.
Macron is prompting “a very valid conversation” about campaign funding and transparency, but “where it runs into trouble is when they try to define fake news,” he said.
The Macron government’s digital affairs chief is lucid about the challenges ahead.
“This is the beginning of the debate. We won’t go too fast,” French Secretary of State for Digital Affairs Mounir Mahjoubi said.
He said governments should not remain complacent, especially with elections coming up in Italy, Russia and the US, and for the European Parliament next year.
“We need to ask this question,” he said, “and work all together on what can be done,” Mahjoubi said.
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