Spanish Government Moves Ahead With First 'Fake News' Prosecution
from the minimum-six-months-for-being-wrong-about-stuff dept
In 2018, the Spanish government amended its Data Protection Law to align it with European regulations like GDPR. While doing so, it slipped in an amendment that targeted "fake news," adding to an already-problematic law that enshrined the "right to be forgotten" and mandated personal data deletion after a certain period of time.
The amendment made the bizarre assertion that the existence of fake news somehow harmed Spanish citizens' free speech rights.
The text of the amendment proposes making administrators of social media, digital platforms and similar services the guarantors of truthful information. To this end, “effective protocols” should be adopted to, if necessary, “eliminate content that violates the constitutional right to freely communicate or receive truthful information through any means of communication.”
The government could have limited itself to fighting questionable speech with less-questionable speech. In fact, it did do this. It hired fact checkers to debunk misinformation being spread on social media ahead of the 2019 elections. The fact-checkers performed real-time debunkings to slow the dissemination of misinformation by political groups and their allies.
Spain elected a new government last Sunday. But, on Saturday, the day when the law forbids campaigns and candidates asking for votes, social media (especially WhatsApp and Facebook) was completely flooded by misinformation.
Newtral and Maldito Bulo, the two verified members of the International Fact-checking Network, were there to work hard.
On the last week of the campaign, they both live fact-checked two TV debates in a row — each one of them with four candidates.
But that's not all the government did. It sent the cops out to literally police speech.
A team of more than 100 Spanish police officers will trawl the internet for signs of fake news and cyber attacks in the build-up to next month’s snap election, the interior ministry said on Friday.
Officials will keep a particularly close eye on Facebook, its WhatsApp messaging app, Twitter and other social media networks under a security plan to protect the vote, the ministry added.
It's unclear what the punishment is for spreading fake news. The law provides for a jail sentence of up to two years for violators, but that's tied to the publication of information that "compromises the dignity" of a protected group. It doesn't say anything specifically about fake news.
All that seems to be clear at this point is that the "effective protocols" involve government prosecutors. Fake news has been addressed successfully by government fact checkers but now this same government has decided to punish someone for saying the wrong things online.
Spanish public prosecutors said Friday they have filed the country’s first lawsuit against the spread of ‘fake news” which targets a woman who tweeted a video falsely claiming to show migrant children harassing a teacher in Spain.
The video, which shows several students overturning desks and insulting a teacher, was in fact filmed in May at a school in Brazil in Sao Paulo state, AFP’s fact-checking team established in September.
Since the government has already publicly denounced the posting as fake and published information about its true origin, it's unclear why it felt the need to move forward with a lawsuit against the person posting it. But it's doing it anyway. Right now, only a judge stands between the Spanish government and its first fake news prosecution.
A judge at a court in Sant Feliu de Llobregat near Barcelona will now have to decide whether or not to accept the lawsuit. Public prosecutors can appeal if the judge decides against hearing the case.
It seems like the same goal could be achieved with the public debunking that has already happened, which amply demonstrated this person isn't a trustworthy source of information. This prosecution needlessly adds injury to insult. Spanish citizens are going to engage in a lot more self-censorship if they believe they might be prosecuted simply for being wrong. And they'll engage in ever more self-censorship if they think anything they say might be perceived as "humiliating" to a protected group.
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Filed Under: fake news, free speech, gdpr, misinformation, spain
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Lies, damned lies and statistics
If all governments make lying illegal, then all the governments will be in jail. What's next?
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This is the "new spanish inquisition."
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Re: Lies, damned lies and statistics
What's fake to lying, deceitful, secretive governments must be true to everyone else.
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So, now in Spain their will be unofficial fake news, and official fake news, with the difference publishing the first gets you in trouble, while posting the second advances a political career.
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Re: Lies, damned lies and statistics
Clearly any government that claims to be making lying illegal is infact lying
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Re: Lies, damned lies and statistics
Haha, like governments face consequences for breaking the law.
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We all have to fight the cyber-terrorism problem with the limited tools we have.
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Re: Lies, damned lies and statistics
Problem ISNT the lying.
Its getting them to ADMIT IT IN PUBLIC..
Get the A$$hats to stand up in front of everyone and Admit, in a Clear fashion, that they did it on Purpose or mistake or it was sent to them as BS.. And they believed it was true so they published it.
Admit they are/were STUPID..
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Re:
And the only ones with the ability to opinion, will be??
POLITICIANS.
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First, they came for the verbs...
And I did not complain,
because I was not a verb.
Then they came for the nouns,
and I did not complain,
because "complain" is a verb,
and they had taken it.
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Wake me up when td is criticizing China's censorship of citizens reporting on the COVID-19 outbreak.
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Re: Re:
Lie detector to Politician: "Have you ever knowingly LIED to the Public?"
That's a carreer ender!
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Re: Re: Re:
I wish!
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Re:
Perhaps you would care to submit a story? That would scratch your itch better than waiting around for someone else to do what's obviously at the top of your mind.
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Re:
Bottom of the page, 'Submit a Story'.
Alternatively, make your own gorram site so you can post articles you think are important rather than whining that someone else's site isn't posting what you want it to.
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'The two tools: Terrible laws, people to apply them, and judges'
The punchline of course is that everyone expects the spanish inquisition at this point.
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Re:
If all you have is a hammer, every problem will then look like a nail...
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This isn't solved with punishing fake news, but rather, by having reliable information sources.
That is, what journalists should be and they aren't, as they are told by their overlords (AKA those who pay them) what to write about and how.
Fake news? What do you do when your journalists are as reliable and truthful as a blog or twitter? And that's being generous with them.
The moment journalists stop telling people what to think and they just give them the information to do the thinking by themselves, then we start talking.
Anyway, this legislation is a bad idea and will probably get challenged in court if not declared straight unconstitutional. The ECHR and Constitutional Court in Spain have been quite harsh with a few freedom of speech incidents like:
So, even if the government comes with this shit, I'm pretty sure it won't go too far either way.
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It's a bit of a stretch
But if you define distorting reality by obscuring facts as Fake News; every Right to Be Forgotten request is Fake News and an attack on free speech.
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Re: Spanish Inquisition
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
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