Angela Merkel fears bots on social media may sway public opinion in upcoming German election

German Chancellor Angela Merkel REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

  25 Nov 2016 , 10:02

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s biggest contender in next year’s German election campaign may not be a rival party leader but so-called “social bots” – software programmed to sway opinion on social media sites. In her first speech to parliament since announcing plans on Sunday to seek a fourth term as chancellor, Merkel called for a debate on how fake news, bots and trolls can manipulate public opinion.

“In order to reach people, to inspire people, we need to deal with this phenomenon and – where necessary – regulate it,” Merkel told lawmakers on Wednesday. The role social networks Facebook and Twitter play in spreading false and malicious information has shot up Merkel’s agenda after the shock election of U.S. Republican candidate Donald Trump as president. Social bots are software programs that mimic human behaviour on social media sites, such as by publishing messages or liking posts. They can be used to spread erroneous information and muddy the debate. Some critics say the proliferation of fake news helped sway the U.S. election in Trump’s favor.

With the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) having chipped away at support for Merkel’s conservatives by attacking her open-door refugee policy, alarm is growing over the influence of bots and fake news on potential voters. In a sign of how seriously Merkel is taking the matter, she invited Simon Hegelich, professor of political data science at the Technical University of Munich, to brief the executive committee of her Christian Democrats (CDU) on Monday.

“Merkel is really interested in the topic of bots and fake news and hate speech on the Internet and she’s very well informed,” said Hegelich. While all of Germany’s political parties have said they will not deploy bots in the campaign, the fact that they are mostly anonymous makes it hard to work out who is behind them. Hegelich does not rule out third parties using them to try to discredit parties or politicians.

The head of the domestic intelligence agency raised concern last week about potential Russian interference in Germany’s election through the use of misleading media stories. Moreover, fake news has become a lucrative business model. In the U.S. election campaign, bloggers without political affiliation realized they could earn money by spreading sensational and false stories. “They act as if they were a news provider, but all the news is fake. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, it’s just a business model to get more clicks on advertising,” said Hegelich.

Echo Rooms

Germany’s established parties, the CDU and the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), are lagging the AfD in engagement on social media. The AfD has racked up more than 300,000 likes on Facebook, while the CDU and SPD can barely muster 240,000 together. While this may not seem many among Germany’s 62 million voters, many Facebook users share posts with one another, increasing their reach.

Algorithms on Facebook also shape what content appears in a user’s news feed, creating so-called “echo rooms” in which posts only reflect user’s own views. Facing a barrage of criticism for failing to stem a flood of phoney news articles in the run-up to the U.S. election, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has disclosed steps to weed out hoaxes and other false information. These include making it easier to report false content, working with third-party verification organizations and journalists on fact-checking efforts, and exploring posting warning labels on content that has been flagged as false.

Justice Minister Heiko Maas said last week Germany would closely monitor how Facebook responds to the challenge of fake news, but said legislative measures were limited. Merkel has raised the idea of a code of conduct for social networks. Thomas Jarzombek, the CDU’s spokesman for digital policy, says more transparency is needed and called on journalists at traditional media companies to debunk fake news and create a more informed debate.

He said with 10 months to go until the election, he believed Germany had time to raise awareness of the issue among voters.

Reuters

Facebook under investigation in Germany for failing to remove racist posts

  05 Nov 2016 , 10:38

German prosecutors are investigating Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives, a spokesman for the Munich prosecutor’s office said on Friday, following a complaint alleging the company broke national laws against hate speech and sedition by failing to remove racist postings.

The spokesman declined to provide further details. German attorney Chan-jo Jun had filed a complaint with prosecutors in the Bavarian city in September and demanded that Facebook executives be compelled to comply with anti-hate speech laws by deleting racist or violent postings from its site.

Facebook’s rules forbid bullying, harassment and threatening language, but critics say it does not do enough to enforce them and has failed to staunch a tide of racist and threatening posts on the social network during an influx of migrants into Europe.

Prosecutors in Hamburg earlier this year rejected a similar complaint by Jun on the grounds that the regional court lacked jurisdiction because Facebook’s European operations are based in Ireland.

“There is a different view in Bavaria,” his firm Jun Lawyers of Wuerzburg in Bavaria said in a statement.

“Upon Jun’s request, Bavarian Justice Minister Winfried Bausback said that Hamburg’s view was wrong and German law does indeed apply to some of the offences,” it said.

Jun’s complaint named Facebook founder and chief executive Zuckerberg and nine other managers at the company, including Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.

Facebook said it had not violated German law and was working on fighting hate speech online.

“We are not commenting on the status of a possible investigation but we can say that the allegations lack merit and there has been no violation of German law by Facebook or its employees,” a company spokesman said.

Jun has compiled a list of 438 postings that were flagged as inappropriate but not deleted over the past year. They include what some might consider merely angry political rants but also clear examples of racist hate speech and calls to violence laced with references to Nazi-era genocide.

Following a public outcry and pressure from German politicians, Facebook this year hired Arvato, a business services unit of Bertelsmann, to monitor and delete racist posts.

A rash of online abuse and violent attacks against newcomers to Germany accompanied the influx of hundreds of thousands of migrants last year, which led to a rise in the popularity of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and has put pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Reuters

German Chancellor Angela Merkel asks Google and Facebook to release privately-developed algorithms

  27 Oct 2016 , 16:08

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has accused technology giants Facebook and Google of “narrowing perspective” and demanded that they make public their privately-developed algorithms, media reported. Merkel, who had previously blamed the social media for anti-immigrant sentiment, said: “The algorithms must be made public, so that one can inform oneself as an interested citizen on questions like, ‘what influences my behaviour on the internet and that of others?’.”

“These algorithms, when they are not transparent, can lead to a distortion of our perception, they narrow our breadth of information,” RT.com quoted Merkel as saying in Berlin this week. Google and Facebook use algorithms to decide which search results are shown first and the order of the news feed respectively. The companies decide to include posts from a user’s liked pages and friends and also promote links to news articles, often based on a user’s own media interests.

According to the report, these algorithms comprise some of the most highly protected trade secrets in the world, potentially worth billions. No internet giant has ever revealed its inner workings. “The big internet platforms, via their algorithms, have become an eye of a needle which diverse media must pass through to reach users. This is a development that we need to pay careful attention to,” Merkel noted.

IANS

Germany will invest $5.6 billion in digital infrastructure over next five years

Image Credit: REUTERS

  13 Oct 2016 , 15:18

Germany plans to invest an extra 5 billion euros ($5.6 billion) over the next five years to equip more than 40,000 schools and colleges with faster internet, wireless access points and tablet computers, the Education Minister said on Wednesday. The investment plan, which still needs to be agreed by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet, is another sign that Germany is more willing to meet international calls to spend its record budget surplus on infrastructure and education.

“We have to make a big leap forward to improve digital education”, Johanna Wanka said, adding that the government would make the money available for the 16 federal states that are traditionally in charge of education in Germany. German schoolchildren have only scored mediocre results in international education studies in the past years, although some evaluations show that they are slowly catching up.

A survey on digital education in Germany has found that less than 2 percent of pupils have daily access to a school computer. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have for years urged Germany to step up public and private investment to boost domestic demand and reduce its massive current account surplus.

Close allies such as France and the United States have also called for Germans to open their wallets, and the government has reacted by increasing its spending on infrastructure and accommodating and integrating a record influx of refugees.

Critics say Germany could do much more like taking advantage of record-low borrowing costs to take on new debt and ditching the balanced budget policy championed by Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble.

In another potential boost for domestic demand, the cabinet agreed on Wednesday on Schaeuble’s proposal to cut income taxes by 6.3 billion euros in 2017 and 2018. The plan, which was already announced by Schaeuble and Merkel last week, aims to correct “cold progression” or bracket creep in the tax system.

Thresholds in Germany’s progressive tax system are not automatically adjusted for inflation. This means that workers who get a pay rise can find themselves ending up with a net pay cut.

Reuters