As I’ve mentioned before, I get a lot of useful information from the German perspective from eugyppius‘s Substack, and it’s especially interesting right now as Germany explores greater state control over social media platforms:
You know what we really need in Germany, what we just don’t have enough of?
Rules.
Specifically, we need more rules about what you can say and to whom you can say it, and more rules about what you’re allowed to read and watch and the kinds of content third-party platforms are allowed to serve you.
We need these rules because right-wing extremism and because Russian disinformation and because Trump and because Alternative für Deutschland and because all the other evils that exist solely and exclusively because of people being allowed to say things and hear things and see things in unmonitored unregulated ways.
Above all we need more rules because we don’t yet have enough rules, even though I swear we have an order of magnitude more rules governing media and speech than any other country in the developed world. We need more rules to rein in scary technological demons that live in the internet, like Social Media Algorithms, which are Literally Destroying Our Democracy by feeding German social media users a steady diet of far-right Russian Trumpist fascist Hitler propaganda. If only it weren’t for these demonic fucking algorithms putting wrong opinions into everyone’s brains, everything in the Federal Republic would be peace joy and pancakes right now, Friedrich Merz would have a 70% approval rating, Sachsen-Anhalt would be in the capable hands of a Green government and Ukrainian Armed Forces would be approaching the gates of Moscow.
The main problem with Social Media Algorithms, apparently, is that they give you too much of the content you like and not enough of the content you don’t like. Stopping these exploitative tactics and ensuring that your feed is filled also with things you don’t care about and never want to see is among the goals of our powerful Broadcasting Commission, as they hammer out the second part of their new Digital Media State Treaty (DMStV).
The intensely necessary, urgently needed and desperately required additional regulations of the DMStV include a provision addressing “the diversity of journalistic content on social media“. This item will foil the demon algorithms by requiring social media platforms to lard users’ feeds with 20% diversity-certified journalistic content. One out of every five videos YouTube recommends and one out of every five tweets in your X feed will have to be diverse! journalistic! content! if and when these draft rules take effect. For the purposes of these obviously warranted rules, anything produced by German public media outlets will be considered diversity-certified automatically, because why not. Private media companies, on the other hand, will have to prove their journalistic integrity and “diversity-promoting” nature before their posts can count towards this 20% quota. The individual State Media Authorities, bastions of far-sighted integrity and wisdom, will decide which private media companies get to count as “diverse”.
