At the moment one of the problems that social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are facing would be fake news and harassment. Both platforms have come up with various ways to deal with them, but it seems that their efforts might not be good enough for the German government.

In a report from Bloomberg, it seems that over in Germany, the government is proposing a bill in which social networks such as Facebook and Twitter could be hit with fines of up to 50 million euros over issues like hate speech or fake news, that is unless they give users a way of reporting such behavior, and if they were to take such content down when prompted.

Speaking to reporters, Justice Minister Heiko Maas said, “We have to increase the pressure on social networks. Too little illegal content is deleted, it’s not deleted quickly enough and it looks like the operators of social networks aren’t taking their users seriously enough.” This is according to a study in which it was found that Twitter and Facebook only took down 1% and 39% of flagged content respectively.

The legislation if passed will make it a requirement for social networks to delete or block content that has been flagged and deemed “obviously illegal”, otherwise they could be at risk at being hit with the massive fine we mentioned earlier.

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