Quartz:

The chairman of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, Thomas Oppermann, has suggested a new law that would require companies like Facebook to set up an office in the country that would deal with fake news and hate speech at all hours of the day. According to English-language version of the German news site Deutsche Welle, German legislators are considering whether to institute a policy that if Facebook’s local office did not delete the news item or hate speech within 24 hours, the social network could expect a fine of €500,000 euros ($522,575) per item.

This is problematic on a number of levels. At the very least, who will judge whether a post is fake? Then there’s the sheer volume of posts. And, of course, there are privacy issues: Facebook posts have a variety of privacy levels. To check all posts, will the watchdogs require access to all posts, even the posts restricted to friends?

The idea of eliminating fake news is critical. And this approach might potentially force Facebook to implement a solution of its own. A difficult problem to solve.