Tuesday, May 28, 2019

The Social Structure

Roughly a week prior to the EU election of Sunday....a young YouTuber came out and blasted away at the CDU and SPD parties....suggesting to his followers to use alternate parties to achieve political results (to be referred to as the 'Rezo-effect'.....after Rezo, the YouTuber).

Well, as you might expect, this drew frustrations after the election ended by the CDU Party chief....Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (AKK).  Yesterday, she came out in a statement and suggested the idea of 'regulating opinions'.  Course, you can guess the German reaction to that.

The quote?  "What would actually happen in this country, if a number of, say, 70 newspaper offices had declared two days before the election, we make a joint appeal: Please do not vote CDU and SPD, that would have been clear opinion before the election."

The discussion of this?  Here's the thing, social media hasn't been fully understood by the political apparatus in Germany.  Their feeling after the 2016 American election....was that fake news was the problem.  They talked for endless hours via public forums about the evils of fake news.  Then in the last twelve months, they hyped up populism.  Now?  They are a bit worried that no-name social commentators over Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube....might be able to influence 10 to 20 percent of the German voters in the last two weeks.

How would you regulate something like this?  My guess is that you'd say for the last ten days of the election period.....no political commentary by anyone (news groups, social media, etc).  Legal?  It's hard to say if the court system would agree to this. 

The problem here is that you might start to see various social commentators that blast away at both the CDU and the SPD....causing fringe parties to gain, and invent some fractured system to mess around with German elections. 

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