Germany Law to Force Algorithm Boost for State-Approved News

NotGMan

It will be ironic if AfD wins and then pushes their right wing viewpoint to the max to everyone. There will be immediately be a "no wait, you can't do that" backlash from the same actors that are proposing this.

jmclnx

>Instagram, and TikTok will be legally required to make those outlets’ content more visible in users’ feeds. That can be a good thing, something is really needed to make sure people see real verifiable facts instead of people's made up conspiracy theories. Add on top of that AI, things could get real bad quickly. But this can easily be abused, I have to wonder what checks will be applied.

benmarten

This is not only undemocratic, but it’s essentially a mild form of censorship.

cowpig

I don't know how I feel about this, conceptually. It's clear that social media are natural monopolies, and are being politically leveraged by the people who run them. So the status quo is definitely far from free speech. It's more of a "command economy of ideas" than a "marketplace". But is this a reasonable solution? I feel like rules around algorithmic neutrality and penalties for misinformation might be better?

Terr_

I think creating a government whitelist of default-promoted sources is almost scarier than action taken against specific ones. There's less friction to prevent abuse of power. At least from an American law perspective, you could point to clear damages on a blacklist and sue.

input_sh

FYI Apollo News isn't really known for its factual accuracy plus they don't disclose the document they're basing their claim on.

uniqueuid

Before this blows up: - The world has very diverse ideas about how media regulation works. Germany has a strong public service broadcast tradition that is constitutionally anchored. You may not like it, but that's the cultural and legal tradition and changing it is not easily done. Please respect that especially coming from a country with a more liberal tradition (and perhaps a less functional media system, e.g. in the US). - The source is a fringe right-wing outlet that most Germans would consider a bit suspicious (not necessarily factually wrong, but tasteless and a bit hysteric perhaps?) - Public service broadcasting in Germany is not influenced by the state (note this says state, not politics or politicians) by design. - Prioritizing public service broadcasters is a pretty logical conclusion from a certain tradition of media regulation and has precedent, e.g. in must carry rules for cable, EPGs etc. So sure, debatable whether this is sensible, but it's at least neither surprising nor evidently nonsensical. Source: Was a tiny bit of an expert on this for a short while.

Calvin02

Well intentioned but hard to do. I’d posit that even if you somehow do this in a neutral way, consumer adoption will fall in three buckets: (1) largely supportive, (2) largely unsupportive, (3) ambivalent/silent majority. People who are largely supportive are already seeking out additional data points in their news consumption. Similarly, people who are largely unsupportive will gravitate towards their chosen echo chamber. The silent majority will remain largely ambivalent and, if they vote, will remain single issue voters. The risk is that the government doesn’t find an effective neutral way for deciding what’s included and what’s not.

delichon

If you are concerned about the AfD remember that they would get this power if they win.

pfdietz

Time and again Europe makes me appreciate the First Amendment.

hannob

I would take this with a very huge grain of salt. The only source seems to be a fringe right-wing news webpage (Apollo News) citing from an internal paper (which, it sounds to me, is just a vague proposal from a media oversight body). I have not seen any reports in major news publications, and would assume there's a lot of context missing in this reporting.

reakj

Springer journalists (Die Welt. Politico) already have to sign that they will publish largely US friendly content. Die Welt censored its comment section that contained too many independent entries in 2022. The entire German press only repeats what Trump says in any given hour, without any reflection. They will criticize the persona of course, but they'll never question fundamental issues like increased US energy dependency or the real causes behind US wars. Germany and the entire EU have been completely neutered by US propaganda. It was different during the Irak war. Now they try censorship to prevent people from voting AfD, Here is a hint: Nothing at all will change anyway if Goldman Sachs ex-employee Weidel is chancellor. She'll be invited to a "talk" to Washington and come back as a puppy dog just like Meloni.

Cider9986

What is the source for this? I doubt the reporter who wrote this publishes on nonogra.ph. Isn't there a rule about using the original article and then paywall bypasses are allowed in comments?

vrganj

"State-Approved" is a scary word for "democratically legitimized", as opposed to engagement-optimized.

ChrisArchitect

OP, please post the source link, not whatever copy'n'paste version this is. https://reclaimthenet.org/germany-social-media-approved-news...

gyanchawdhary

stunning to watch one of the countries the world owes so much to in terms of scientific and intellectual progress drift toward something this dumb .. if the reporting is accurate. I lived in Hamburg for thrre years, and the town center constantly felt like a stage for some protest .. activist NGO campaign .. or ideological cause., .. and every time you mentioned it .. folks would respond with the same almost predictable utterence about how “protest is part of German democratic tradition” and how proud they are of it .. what was interesting though was that privately, a lot of them quietly agreed with my observations .. especially coming from an Indian guy, because they knew I wasn’t coming at it from some stereotypical right wing European angle...

mdurana

Apollo (the original publisher of this) is a right-conservative outlet and has been involved in a few disinformation scandals before (like during the Mannheim Christmas market attack where they spread a forged police note saying that the suspect was a black man) so I’d take this with a grain of salt. The article is also pretty clickbaity. Current law says that media paid for by taxes shouldn’t be purposefully buried deep in menus or made hard for an average user to find than private media. It does not mean they have to be ranked above everyone else in search results or algorithmic feeds; search and ranking still have to be non-discriminatory. And now Apollo claims to have seen an internal draft from media regulators on a state level that would expand this to individual posts in algorithmic feeds, that's it. They're blowing it out of proportion. Nobody's talking about "forceful algorithm boost" or changing the ranking or search or stuff like that. Also Apollo won't share this doc so none of their claims can really be verified either way.