【Anticipation】

In the latest chapter of the "fake news" saga,Anticipation Facebook is now facing off against an entire country as German officials want to fine the social media platform for every fake story that makes its way to the newsfeed.

Thomas Oppermann, party chairman of the Social Democratic Party, told Der Spiegelthat because Facebook hasn't gotten its act together yet despite knowing fake news and hate messages proliferated on the site, the company should be subject to a €500,000 fine ($523,320).

The threats come just as Facebook announced new tools to fight the spread of fake news, including an option for users to flag fake news and third-party fact-checking with help from the Poynter International Fact Checking Network.

Mashablereached out to Facebook for comment on the ongoing debate in Germany but the company hasn't replied.

Germany's approach to hate speech

Germany's current hate speech laws were originally conceived in 1949 in an effort to curb any incitement that would lead to the type of fascism and atrocities borne out of World War II.

Specifically, one part of the German criminal code, per German outletDeutsche Welle, says a person can be jailed for up to five years if that person:

"incites hatred against a national, racial, religious group or a group defined by their ethnic origins, against segments of the population or individuals because of their belonging to one of the aforementioned groups or segments of the population or calls for violent or arbitrary measures against them."

Though the law has often been used to prosecute anti-Semitism and Holocaust deniers, German prosecutors have shifted in more recent years in using the law to battle hate speech against migrants.

While examples of hate speech have been deleted from Facebook under the existing law, it seems the plan to impose such penalties would be included under a new law that specifically targets social media. Volker Kauder, of the Christian Democrats (CDU) party, said last week, "We plan to impose high penalties that would affect companies like Facebook if they do not meet their responsibilities."

Part of that new law would also include requiring the platforms to have employees based in Germany so that requests to remove the flagged stories could be acted on faster.

Wider call for action

Oppermann and Kauder are hardly the only German officials calling on Facebook to be held accountable. Germany's Justice Minister Heiko Maas shared a similar sentiment in a separate interview with the newspaper Bild am Sonntag, saying, "Justice authorities must prosecute [hate speech and fake news], even on the internet. Anyone who tries to manipulate the political discussion with lies needs to be aware (of the consequences)."

Maas underscored this in a post on (of course) Facebook, making mention of Germany's 2017 election, saying that any company that "achieves billions in the net has a social responsibility." He added (via Google Translator): "Parties should not manipulate political debates, they should refrain from social bots and fake news. The election campaign 2017 must not be a digital lie battle."

With that election fast approaching, the ruling coalition government in Germany wants to open debate on the aforementioned new law after the Christmas recess, according to Deuschte Welle.

Maas helped set-up a task force in 2015 that included reps from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to help quell hate speech on those platforms but, according to a recently published report (via The Guardian), none of the platforms have been very successful.

Per that report, Facebook was actually the most successful by flagging 46 percent of posts that violate Germany's stringent hate speech laws; YouTube only flagged 10 percent, and Twitter managed to flag a paltry 1 percent.

Right to be forgotten

There's an even wider context to Europe's apparent flexibility on the matter of internet censorship, most notably with its controversial "right to be forgotten" law that allows EU residents to request that stories about them containing information that is "inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant, or excessive" to be removed from search results.

Google has fought the ruling since it was approved in 2014 by an EU court and is also fighting the fact that a decision reached by France's highest court will apply globally, affecting all Google domains, not just search results in France.

In both instances, European countries are exerting a certain level of censorship, even if under the auspices of curbing "hate speech" or "irrelevant" information, that's hard to fathom being tolerated in the United States.

A messy freedom

It's that mentality that's led to headaches for social media platforms in the U.S. Twitter has faced a dilemma regarding which alt-right accounts to suspend or allow, and Facebook has been caught in a well-documented struggle with editorial control over trending news stories, a stumble that some blame for the aforementioned spread of fake news that's led us to this point.

Even more difficult to discern: what roll should these platforms have when even the president-elect of the United States is making false claims?

There have been some state laws proposed in the United States that tread on similar territory to the European laws, most notably one law -- dubbed the "eraser button" law -- in California that requires websites give minors an option to delete photos or other data about them, but with little effect.

The "eraser button" law only applies to data and information minors upload themselves nor does it guarantee the removal of that data from wherever it may have been archived. And just this week, a South Carolina lawmaker wants to stop people from accessing online porn which has long since been declared protected free speech.

But there's nothing on a national level in the U.S. that compares to the European models mentioned here. After all, the United States has been down that road before, most notably with the Sedition Acts of 1798 and 1918 that sought to curb speech that criticized the government in a time of war and, yes, penalize false statements. Both acts were later repealed and have come to be maligned over the decades.

But that doesn't mean there isn't room for concern in this specific case. Between Germany's threat and France's fight to globallyapply the "right to be forgotten" ruling, all eyes will be on how the social media platforms respond and where those decisions could take us from here.