Germany threatens to fine Facebook €500,000 for each fake news post

It's also not "Germany" that is threatening this fine but a single (though influential) politician. The proposal has sparked quite some debate and nobody can say whether it will result in any new law let alone any details.

'<major politician> engaged in a <criminal activity>'. No way to verify. If genuinely fake news, delete - no fine, not delete - big fine. If true, delete - no fine, not delete - risk of fine, which may or may not be returned later, depending on how powerful said politician is...

So the end result is that only news from entities explicitly allowed by the government are safe to keep.

Here's a funny thing: the only government that's not going to abuse this is the one that's not hiding anything nefarious! So the end result is: all stories that uncover really bad things about the government are going to disappear, and the entity that made/published it is going to be labelled 'fake news' if it wasn't already. Which means the only way for a media entity to survive is to self-censor.

There's also a bit of a motte and bailey argument involved in this campaign. In particular, when people ask "Can't the 'fake news' label just be applied to any politically unfavorable news source to suppress them?", the response is usually "Oh, this will only be used for those crazy clickbait sites that just come up with random titles and spam Facebook ads.". But then in other contexts, it's very obvious that NYT, AP, etc. are using this to refer to lower-quality but only marginally more falsehood-prone tabloids like Breitbart. Besides the differing political bias, the difference between breitbart and NYT is a matter of selectivity. Breitbart might publish more questionable or false stories (higher false positive rate) but they also publish true things that the NYT doesn't (lower false negative rate). For example, NYT's coverage of the Podesta leaks was garbage, and I had to turn to smaller, less reputable news sources to find (100% verifiable) coverage of leaked email contents.

Let's also not pretend that the media groups leading this campaign are innocent of (intentionally or unintentionally) publishing some outright false or misleading content themselves. Sure, they do it less frequently, but they're no saints.

As for the OP, it is absolutely unreasonable to allow the government to dictate the truth. I should not have to spell out how that can and will go wrong. Permit people to believe what they will. If you're worried about false information, try to make better information management tools rather than using the government to force people into some arbitrarily chosen "correct" belief system. This isn't some stupid appeal to the idea that objective truth doesn't exist; it's recognizing the fact that any one person (or government Ministry of Truth) is almost certainly wrong about a non-negligible number of things, and it's better for at least some people to be right about any given topic than for every single person to be uniformly right or wrong about any given topic.

Facebook has a moral responsibility to exercise some editorial control imho.

On the other hand, perhaps this forces Facebook to give up on being a "news platform", too, and not just a social network, which wouldn't be a terrible thing to happen.