As Facebook struggles to respond to criticism about how much responsibility — if any — it bears for a wave of fake news that engulfed the social network during the U.S. election campaign, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been doing his best to deny that the company is a media entity.
There are a number of reasons why Facebook doesn’t want to describe itself as a media company, including economic ones. But one big reason is that being defined in such a way could open the network up to regulation, and impose a range of responsibilities.
Some senior members of the European Union, for example, are eager to treat Facebook the same way they treat media companies that own newspapers, or radio stations and TV networks.
German Justice Minister Heiko Maas said on Thursday that he believes social platforms like Facebook should be defined as media entities for regulatory purposes. “In my view they should be treated as media even if they do not correspond to the media concept of television or radio,” he said in Berlin.
Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017
Facebook and other social-media services are currently protected from liability for hate speech or illegal content posted on their platforms, in the same way U.S. companies are. But media companies that own newspapers and radio or TV stations do not have this kind of protection.
A group of web service companies including Google, Facebook and Twitter signed an EU hate speech accord earlier this year, which requires them to respond within 24 hours to notifications about hate speech on their platforms.
The agreement is voluntary, however, and some European regulators believe that legislative measures are necessary to prevent such services from spewing xenophobia and racism. One German minister at the meeting that Maas attended said these new laws should impose a penalty of up to $1 million for each offence.
A number of Facebook watchers — including one major Silicon Valley investor in the company — have said the company has no real economic incentive to admit it is a media entity, because it would drag the social network into a legislative morass. The German justice minister’s musings are just one example of how that fear could be manifested if Facebook were to go that route. But ultimately it may have no choice.