Should internet giants like Google and Facebook have a “duty of care” to their users TO shield them from misinformation?
World Health Organisation declared Britain to be officially free from measles, a highly infectious illness that killed about 110,000 people around the world in 2017. The success was short-lived. After 991 infections were recorded in England and Wales in 2018, theCases of measles are rising in many countries, fuelled in part by conspiracy theories claiming that vaccines given to children cause autism . “Anti-vaxxers” have long used internet forums and social media to spread their nonsense.
In June, for instance, Singapore passed the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act. The city-state’s bossy government presented it as an anti-“fake news” bill. It bars the dissemination of online lies deemed to be against the public interest, on pain of fines of up to $1m or ten years in jail. Singapore’s government defines the public interest expansively.
One of the most influential jurisdictions will be the European Union , a market of 500m rich consumers which restricts speech more than America does. Until now, individual member states have done much of the work. Germany passed its “Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz” law in 2017, which gives social-media firms 24 hours to remove fake news and hate speech or face fines of up to €50m . In July France passed similar legislation.
Monitoring the torrent of content that passes through their servers is a huge task. More than 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute; thousands of tweets are posted every second. For all the hopeful chatter about artificial intelligence , Alex Stamos, a former chief security officer at Facebook, argues that, in the end, human labour—and lots of it—is the only solution. Algorithms already struggle to make relatively straightforward decisions.
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