As a liberal democracy, France’s anti-fake news law has a different story than the others. Rather than the primary criticism of the law being that its curbing freedom of speech, it seems to be the fact that its targeted at foreign publications, specifically the Russian press.
One of the publications, RT, claims that the French President, Emmanuel Macron, harbors a grudge against certain Russian media outlets. He allegedly referred to RT and Sputnik as ‘propaganda’ feeds and has kept Russian journalists from access to be working visits.
While putting laws in place might be a deterrent for the spread of misinformation, there’s still a lot that falls in the grey area and what amounts to censorship.
For instance, when reporting a fake news post on WhatsApp, does the person spreading the news face trouble or the creator? And, with end-to-end encryption that supposedly keeps messages from being read — even by the companies in charge — how does one track down the original sender?
Many tech giants, while conceding to government demands for more checks, have previously been staunchly against efforts to censor speech, especially in authoritarian countries like China. Google famously pulled out of China in 2010, citing censorship issues.
Then there’s the question of defining ‘fake news’ because, on the one hand, there’s actual misinformation and, on the other, there are legitimate news articles that are shared on social media channels that can be flagged as ‘anti-national’ posts or fake news, inviting potential punishment.
While the US has one of the most liberal laws against any form of government censorship, Donald Trump, the President of the United States, has often publicly labelled credible news outlets like CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times as publishers of fake news, and declared that ‘the press the enemy of the people.