At least from an American law perspective, you could point to clear damages on a blacklist and sue.
As miserable as this admin is, it's also a great example of why some powers shouldn't be in the government's hands.
I’d posit that even if you somehow do this in a neutral way, consumer adoption will fall in three buckets: (1) largely supportive, (2) largely unsupportive, (3) ambivalent/silent majority.
People who are largely supportive are already seeking out additional data points in their news consumption. Similarly, people who are largely unsupportive will gravitate towards their chosen echo chamber. The silent majority will remain largely ambivalent and, if they vote, will remain single issue voters.
The risk is that the government doesn’t find an effective neutral way for deciding what’s included and what’s not.
- The world has very diverse ideas about how media regulation works. Germany has a strong public service broadcast tradition that is constitutionally anchored. You may not like it, but that's the cultural and legal tradition and changing it is not easily done. Please respect that especially coming from a country with a more liberal tradition (and perhaps a less functional media system, e.g. in the US).
- The source is a fringe right-wing outlet that most Germans would consider a bit suspicious (not necessarily factually wrong, but tasteless and a bit hysteric perhaps?)
- Public service broadcasting in Germany is not influenced by the state (note this says state, not politics or politicians) by design.
- Prioritizing public service broadcasters is a pretty logical conclusion from a certain tradition of media regulation and has precedent, e.g. in must carry rules for cable, EPGs etc.
So sure, debatable whether this is sensible, but it's at least neither surprising nor evidently nonsensical.
Source: Was a tiny bit of an expert on this for a short while.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240207032743/https://polkom.if...
But in practical terms, while there are some very obvious gaps and biases, I think the German media system is still pretty good in a lot of ways and everybody does have a lot of freedom.
I'd even go so far as to say - the typical accusations of censorship are mostly from right-wing actors who are not censored, but who demand more views and make a spectacle out of claiming to be censored.
To me this seems like a gross intervention in the media so I'm struggling not to be critical here. Just because different cultures have different values does not make them equal.
The historic precedent is that Germany's first Chancellor wanted to establish a state-funded and state-directed TV station. This was explicitly shut down by the constitutional court.
As a result, a system was established to (1) ensure funding is not decided upon by state institutions but instead by an independent body of experts (KEF). (2) control over the meta-level content decisions is exercised by a body (essentially like a parliament) of representatives from societal groups (e.g. including politicians, doctors, churches etc etc.)
Now the "gross intervention in the media" is a very recent American idea - up until pretty recently the US did have the fairness doctrine, it has licensing and so on, all of these are gross interventions in media. And so are libel laws etc. So the German insight that underpins its media regulation is: You cannot have functional mass media without enabling them through some form of state action, you can only try to be light-handed and implement checks and balances.
In my country the federal government heavily subsidises media in addition to their own state-run broadcaster, and there is noticeable bias which is a point of contention. Perhaps the German system is superior in this regard. But I am heavily skeptical of interventions like this.
I believe watching some "tagesschau", the primary format of the public media in Germany would be something of interest for every US citizen. Just to experience the style.
It's part of German culture, all movies on all channels start at 8:15, because that's when tagesschau ends. The structure, the style, how news are reported has not really changed since the 80s, maybe it has basically never changed.
They do framing, I don't think you can report news without framing them, but it never gets wild and they try to show what different sides have to say about a matter.
Others have already pointed out that the source of this article is not reliable, so we should wait what actually gets proposed.
The article is also pretty clickbaity. Current law says that media paid for by taxes shouldn’t be purposefully buried deep in menus or made hard for an average user to find than private media. It does not mean they have to be ranked above everyone else in search results or algorithmic feeds; search and ranking still have to be non-discriminatory. And now Apollo claims to have seen an internal draft from media regulators on a state level that would expand this to individual posts in algorithmic feeds, that's it. They're blowing it out of proportion. Nobody's talking about "forceful algorithm boost" or changing the ranking or search or stuff like that. Also Apollo won't share this doc so none of their claims can really be verified either way.
can you back this up with a source? cause my google search didn't reveal anything of that kind.
[0] https://reclaimthenet.org/germany-social-media-approved-news...
https://reclaimthenet.org/germany-social-media-approved-news...
The only source seems to be a fringe right-wing news webpage (Apollo News) citing from an internal paper (which, it sounds to me, is just a vague proposal from a media oversight body). I have not seen any reports in major news publications, and would assume there's a lot of context missing in this reporting.
Die Welt censored its comment section that contained too many independent entries in 2022.
The entire German press only repeats what Trump says in any given hour, without any reflection. They will criticize the persona of course, but they'll never question fundamental issues like increased US energy dependency or the real causes behind US wars.
Germany and the entire EU have been completely neutered by US propaganda. It was different during the Irak war.
Now they try censorship to prevent people from voting AfD, Here is a hint: Nothing at all will change anyway if Goldman Sachs ex-employee Weidel is chancellor. She'll be invited to a "talk" to Washington and come back as a puppy dog just like Meloni.
That can be a good thing, something is really needed to make sure people see real verifiable facts instead of people's made up conspiracy theories. Add on top of that AI, things could get real bad quickly.
But this can easily be abused, I have to wonder what checks will be applied.
This proposal is less about verifiable facts and more about the German government forcing its narrative on its populace.
There will be immediately be a "no wait, you can't do that" backlash from the same actors that are proposing this.
Win-win for the CDU/CSU and the AfD, the CDU gains power and has a boogeyman to use to scare voters into voting for them.
It's clear that social media are natural monopolies, and are being politically leveraged by the people who run them. So the status quo is definitely far from free speech. It's more of a "command economy of ideas" than a "marketplace".
But is this a reasonable solution? I feel like rules around algorithmic neutrality and penalties for misinformation might be better?
I lived in Hamburg for thrre years, and the town center constantly felt like a stage for some protest .. activist NGO campaign .. or ideological cause., .. and every time you mentioned it .. folks would respond with the same almost predictable utterence about how “protest is part of German democratic tradition” and how proud they are of it ..
what was interesting though was that privately, a lot of them quietly agreed with my observations .. especially coming from an Indian guy, because they knew I wasn’t coming at it from some stereotypical right wing European angle...