France to combat fake news with rapid response law

“The measures that we will be working on from now until March are to create a law about ‘confidence in information’ that will permit us to act very quickly when a fake news story goes viral, particularly during an election period,” said Françoise Nyssen in an interview with Journal du Dimanche on Sunday.

The new measure will establish responsibilities for media platforms and require that they cooperate with the government and be transparent about their content. It will also establish a procedure to allow for the “rapid blocking of the dissemination of fake news once it has become manifest,” she said.