{"id":35687,"date":"2018-07-03T06:29:59","date_gmt":"2018-07-03T11:29:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35687"},"modified":"2018-07-03T06:29:59","modified_gmt":"2018-07-03T11:29:59","slug":"the-official-fake-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35687","title":{"rendered":"The Official Fake News"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Official Fake News<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n

Emmanuel Macron, who was comfortably elected to the presidency with the support of almost the entire French media, has demanded that his parliamentary majority provide him with a law against \u2018fake news\u2019 during election campaigns. Perhaps he\u2019s preparing for the next one.<\/p>\n

The draft legislation reveals both the blindness of those who govern when challenged\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>their inclination to invent new coercive countermeasures. You would have to be myopic indeed to believe that the victory of \u2018anti-establishment\u2019 candidates, parties and causes (Donald Trump, Brexit, the Catalan referendum, Italy\u2019s Five Star Movement) could, even marginally, be the consequence of authoritarian regimes spreading fake news. The US press has been trying to demonstrate for a year, as yet without conclusive evidence, that Trump owes his election to fake news manufactured by Vladimir Putin.<\/p>\n

Macron has a similar obsession, to the point of hoping to make fake news vanish with a law that is both useless and dangerous. Useless because France\u2019s Council of State pointed out on 19 April that \u2018French law already contains several measures intended to combat the dissemination of false information\u2019: in particular the law of 29 July 1881 on the freedom of the press, which permits curbs on the dissemination of false information and the expression of views that are defamatory or abusive or incite hatred.<\/p>\n

And dangerous because the bill about to go before parliament would require a judge to act within 48 hours to \u2018stop the artificial and large-scale dissemination of news constituting false information.\u2019 But, the Council of State\u2019s response continued, \u2018these are hard to determine legally, especially when the judge must give a judgement within a very short time.\u2019 Macron\u2019s law would also strengthen Internet service providers\u2019 and hosts\u2019 duty of cooperation with the authorities, since it extends to all false information restraints that were initially aimed at preventing \u2018apologism for crimes against humanity, incitement to hatred and child pornography.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Official Fake News Emmanuel Macron, who was comfortably elected to the presidency with the support of almost the entire French media, has demanded that his parliamentary majority provide him with a law against \u2018fake news\u2019 during election campaigns. Perhaps he\u2019s preparing for the next one. The draft legislation reveals both the blindness of those […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[5493,7844,15342,2779,2239,512,1494,938,694,17850,857],"class_list":["post-35687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-counterpunch","tag-donald-trump","tag-emmanuel-macron","tag-fake-news","tag-freedom-of-the-press","tag-media","tag-press","tag-press-freedom","tag-russia","tag-serge-halimi","tag-vladimir-putin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35687"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35688,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35687\/revisions\/35688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}