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A comment on Facebook and Google pressured EU experts to soften fake news regulations. Parent comment

Re:Facebook and Google pressured EU experts to soften fake n... by libria on Tuesday May 21, 2019 @11:28AM (#19971013)
No, I think the EU was inflammatory with wording: "heavy-arm wrestling in the corridors", "blackmail". At least in the US, you can't throw "blackmail" around casually as it carries a heavy criminal implication. We're talking about gifts and donations they have no rights to and that Facebook has no obligation to give.

Now the gifts themselves are a conflict of interest so they should never be allowed. Show of EU hands, who wants to outlaw all FB/GOOG gifts?

This is a case of wanting to bite the hand that feeds you and then whine when the hand yanks back the handouts too. Sure FB/GOOG plays a little dirty, but all corps/political states play this game.

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Re:Facebook and Google pressured EU experts to soften fake n... by b_tterc_p on Tuesday May 21, 2019 @12:20PM (#19971641)
> We're talking about gifts and donations they have no rights to and that Facebook has no obligation to give.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm not sure this is true (everywhere or anywhere in particular). A donation has to be a donation, free of stipulations. If you say you intend to give a donation and you say that if you don't get certain policies then you won't give the donation; then its clear that you intend to receive a service for your donation, making it a business transaction (and potentially an illegal one).

As I said before, there are easy ways to accomplish the same thing. You're just not supposed to explicitly say "if you don't give me what I want, the money stops".

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