TikTok Stops The TikToking In Russia As It Tries To Figure Out Its New ‘Fake News’ Law
An astounding number of people seem to think that having a fake news" law would be a good idea, even as we've shown over and over and over again how those kinds of laws are always abused by authoritarian goons to silence criticism. As part of its ongoing offensive on both Ukraine and the truth, Russia has passed its own new fake news law that would offer criminal penalties up to 15 years in jail for statements that discredit" the Russian military.
Because of this new law, TikTok has announced that it needs to suspend any new content in Russia to avoid running afoul of the law:
2/ In light of Russia's new fake news' law, we have no choice but to suspend livestreaming and new content to our video service while we review the safety implications of this law. Our in-app messaging service will not be affected.
- TikTokComms (@TikTokComms) March 6, 2022
Now, there had been reports that TikTok was not prepared" for how it would be used in the war, and that as hard as the company tried to stay out of such disputes, that was proving impossible. But, still, this latest move really demonstrates why the whole idea of a fake news" law is so dangerous. For websites who act as intermediaries, hosting speech for users, there's simply no way you can avoid running afoul of such a law, since users are coming up with their own speech in real time, and there's no realistic way to monitor it all.
Now, I know some people still insist that somehow a fake news law in the US would somehow be different," but the fundamental reality is the same. Websites that carry millions to billions of pieces of real time communications content cannot accurately monitor all that speech, let alone adjudicate what content is real and which is fake - and that's not even getting into the question of according to whom" which is at issue in most fake news" laws, where the answer is according to the government which only wants its propaganda allowed."
So rather than going down such a path, can we just realize that any such law would be (1) abused by the powerful, and (2) make it impossible for many websites to provide the kinds of services that people rely on to communicate today?