By Steven L. Krongold
Steven L. Krongold specializes in business litigation. For the past 30 years, Mr. Krongold has litigated disputes involving trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, invasion of privacy, cybersquatting, investment fraud, defamation, and other business-related torts. Mr. Krongold can be reached at the Krongold Law Corp., P.C., located in Orange County, CA.
Fake news stories cause real harm. This country saw the results at Comet Ping Pong in Washington, D.C. Astonishing as it seems, a man walked into the pizzeria with a loaded gun because he believed stories of child trafficking in the restaurant's back rooms, which, in turn, had some connection to then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sites now face increasing pressure to monitor traffic to weed out patently false and misleading information. A Reddit community entitled "Pizzagate" was taken down. The site now states "This subreddit was banned due to a violation of our content policy, specifically, the proliferation of personal and confidential information. We don't want witch hunts on our site." Facebook then announced that Snopes.com would be allowed to label stories as "fake." Facebook also filed for a patent on a program created by Israeli software programmers that would identify and remove "objectionable content," such as "pornography, hate speech...
