Disinformation : The German Approach and What to Learn From It

On its side, France’s law on the audiovisual sector focuses mainly on copyright issues, and on ensuring that the content video platforms such as Netflix produce or present online is diverse (two topics highly debated by industry players in France). It makes little mention of algorithms (it only states, in the introduction, that recommendation algorithms play a role in weakening social cohesion by isolating citizens). Interestingly, it insists on the ability of users to classify content, for instance to distinguish the content that is produced by a platform from other types of content. However, if it asks platforms to do so, it does not include measures to look at exactly how the content is classified, and does not address the question of how recommendations work.

The Digitization law: updating Germany’s competition law

A third and final example of German internet regulation is that of the new competition rules proposed by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. A reform of the long-standing Act against Restraints of Competition ("GWB-Digitalisierungsgesetz") aims at addressing power imbalances in the digital economy, specifically by looking at how large players with strong positions across markets may abuse that role to restrict competition. The law, if passed, would acknowledge that market dominance can be attained when companies hold a lot of (user) data. By becoming a type of gatekeeper (or "intermediary power"), these strong and dominant companies can affect other businesses’ development and overall competition.
The federal cartel office would receive expanded powers to tackle such intermediary power, which is expected to apply to companies such as Facebook, Google and Amazon. For example, the draft proposes that competitors would have easier access rights to data from companies that dominate a market. The reform could be an important step in further adapting the legal framework to data-driven business models that underly some of most crucial challenges of the digital public sphere.

Indeed, from a technology policy standpoint, the real challenge that disinformation raises is not that untruths circulate online, but that it is possible to give these untruths disproportionate substance and turn them into political weapons.

To see how this system can be gamed to do so, actors other than the platforms need to have access to it to find efficient solutions. They need access to the pipes through which disinformation flows and an idea about the way the pipe managers deal with it. While it might seem enticing to envision a single non-state, independent oversight body (preferably at the EU level) to inspect the pipes and pipe managers, for now, this is just that: a pipe dream. In the absence of such an overarching EU cooperation, different existing regulatory authorities will have to figure out ways to deal with big tech companies which help shape the information and media environment for billions of people.

A first step towards that is creating transparency at the platforms, which is evident in the German approach: tech companies need to be more open about their content moderation practices (NetzDG), their algorithms (media regulation) and providing data access to users and competitors (competition law). If the specifics of what transparency means (and for whom) are established, this could be helpful in dealing with disinformation, making it more difficult to purposefully distort reality in an intent to do harm through coordination and mechanical amplification.

Copyright: PHILIPPE HUGUEN / AFP