Guest essay by Eric Worrall
German Chancellor Angela Merkel is planning new censorship laws, a harsh crack down on “fake news”, which according to President Obama seems to include any criticism of climate theory.
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“Something has changed — as globalization has marched on, [political] debate is taking place in a completely new media environment. Opinions aren’t formed the way they were 25 years ago,” she said Wednesday while addressing Germany’s Bundestag, or parliament. “Today we have fake sites, bots, trolls — things that regenerate themselves, reinforcing opinions with certain algorithms, and we have to learn to deal with them.”
Merkel indicated that she supported tougher measures to crack down on hate speech in its various forms and figure out new ways to regulate the complicated ecosystem of online information (and misinformation).
“I believe we should not underestimate what is happening in the context of the Internet and with digitalization; this is part of our reality,” Merkel said. “We have regulations that allow for our press freedom, including the requirement for due diligence from journalists. Today we have many that experience a media that is based on very different foundations and is much less regulated.”
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President Obama stating the problematic new media ecosystem includes “climate denial”
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The new media ecosystem “means everything is true and nothing is true,” Obama told me later. “An explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers’ payroll. And the capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal—that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation.”
That marked a decisive change from previous political eras, he maintained. “Ideally, in a democracy, everybody would agree that climate change is the consequence of man-made behavior, because that’s what ninety-nine per cent of scientists tell us,” he said. “And then we would have a debate about how to fix it. That’s how, in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, you had Republicans supporting the Clean Air Act and you had a market-based fix for acid rain rather than a command-and-control approach. So you’d argue about means, but there was a baseline of facts that we could all work off of. And now we just don’t have that.”
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Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/28/obama-reckons-with-a-trump-presidency
Does Angela Merkel think criticism of climate science should be included in her crackdown? I haven’t found a direct quote where Merkel describes climate “denial” as “fake news”, but given how close she is to President Obama on this subject, this seems a reasonable assumption.
Under German Law, Merkel has the power to prosecute or imprison people who voice proscribed opinions. German Law, unlike the US Constitution, does not provide a guarantee of free speech. German law contains a broad and vaguely defined concept of Volksverhetzung, “incitement of the masses”.
Volksverhetzung, in English “incitement of the masses”, “instigation of the people” (the official English translation of the German Criminal Code uses “incitement to hatred”), is a concept in German criminal law that refers to incitement to hatred against segments of the population and refers to calls for violent or arbitrary measures against them, including assaults against the human dignity of others by insulting, maliciously maligning, or defaming segments of the population.
It is often applied to, though not limited to, trials relating to Holocaust denial in Germany. The criminal code (Strafgesetzbuch) Chapter 7 (Offences against public order), Paragraph 130 (Incitement to hatred) of the Federal Republic of Germany defines when a person is guilty of Volksverhetzung.
The concept draws criticism by press and legal scholars for not being defined with the necessary definiteness and violating the principle of clarity and definiteness (Bestimmtheitsgrundsatz) and thus is called an elastic clause (Gummiparagraph) allowing in theory to punish nearly any political statment made and violating the freedom of speech.
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Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksverhetzung
The only silver lining to this ghastly business is in order to legally persecute “climate deniers”, if this is Merkel’s intention, she will have to define what climate denial actually is. Defining climate “denial” is harder than it might seem, because there is a lot of agreement about the fundamental physics. A legal definition of climate “denial” would have to include ridiculously prescriptive clauses, such as “expressing a belief that equilibrium climate sensitivity may be less than 1.5c / doubling of CO2”.
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I thought WUWT was a site about climate and science. But now I see just uninformed and one-sided talking about politics an lots of Merkel-Bashing. I got a bit angry.
“I got a bit angry.”
Why?
I think your own ignorance is the problem here. A government authority will typically bring a court case against anyone whose opinions they disagree with, if particular laws are sufficiently ambiguous, which usually they are. This is the case in the UK, Canada, Australia, and Germany. And many other Western countries. Here the process is the punishment. You can lose hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions, even when you ‘win’ the case. Because you seldom recover fully your court costs. You get back what the Court decides to grant you. Because of the US constitution, the only redeeming feature the US has over other countries, is that ultimately the case would or should be lost on freedom of speech grounds. Although that doesn’t necessarily get your money back either. Ask Mark Steyn.
I neglected to add that it is almost always government authorities that bring such actions against their citizens. It is extremely rare that fellow citizens commence such actions against others. This is because government authorities have (in practical terms) unlimited financial resources, and it’s not their money anyway. So if they ‘lose’ they don’t particularly care. The point of the exercise is to punish dissenting opinion, not necessarily to ‘win’ the case. Although they would prefer to also win.
This site seems to have been taken over by Alt-Right tin foilers. Shame, really. I am also on the Right. But I’m not Alt-Right. Alt-Right is faux “Right” – it’s actually a revolutionary movement. Maybe closer to Soviet Communism and / or Fascism than its adherents would care to consider.
The “alt right” – whatever or whoever they are – all seven of them I suspect, are the new Emmanuel Goldstein’s of the Left.
Nah, just another bunch of hipsters on a new fad. They have their own language, hairstyles and clothes.
The Alt-Right are just a bunch of lightweights indulging in irony and self satirization. We won’t remember them within a year.
The political correct mass media say they don’t censure news, instead they now do fact checking. In other words, the Orwellian newspeak for censorship is “fact checking”. The facts are of course only what the politically correct journalists define as facts. Divergence of views are no longer allowed.
You can’t fact check stories you make up. Although since any clown wants to be a media expert it’s not difficult for broadcast media to come up with an ‘expert’ that agrees with whatever angle they are peddling. This is what now passes for ‘fact checking’ these days, if they even bother to do that.
Everybody go look up ”PIZZAGATE” at YouTube. This is what the ”fake news” thing is about to a significant degree.
It’s fake news until it isn’t. Hillary Clinton’s health concerns were dismissed as ‘fake news’ until she was caught on camera collapsing.
Like John Edwards’ Affair.
Well, this reinforces my perception that the technically skilled tend to be proportionately socially inept (Dr. Strangelove…).
If Merkel’s “idea” of protecting the public from its own stupidity (Big Sister, yeah!) flies, maybe Trump will be accused of “News Fakery” before the World Court (which the US doesn’t recognize).
And maybe the US State Department would in turn declare Merkel an “Undesirable Alien”, as it did former UN Secretary General and (at the time) President of Austria, Kurt Waldheim.
May you live in interesting times, as the Chinese curse goes…
Here’s a thought. Try to get funding to create a documented list of “fake news” globally propagated over the period since the end of World War II.
A few suggestions:
The German Wehrmacht/SS massacre of the Polish Officer Corps at Katyn Wood (nyet)
The Tang Shan earthquake of 1976 killed only 10,000 people (bu dui)
The Iraqui invaders’ murder of premature babies in Kuwait (whoa Nellie!)