BERLIN — With an election looming in September, fake news is big news in Germany.

So concerned is the German government by a growing quantity of false and defamatory information online that it is going further than others in pressuring tech companies to better police their networks. Parliament approved a new law this month under which lawmakers could soon impose fines of up to €50 million on social media firms if they fail to remove criminal content like defamatory and hate-inciting posts quickly enough.

"Something has changed," Chancellor Angela Merkel told parliament shortly after fake news played a prominent role in the U.S. election. "Today we have fake sites, bots, trolls ... We must confront this phenomenon and if necessary, regulate it."

It's one thing to confront fake news and another to find a solution for it. Germany is hardly alone. Policymakers, the media and tech companies on both sides of the Atlantic have struggled for months now to improvise responses.

The company at the center of the fake news battle is Facebook. Since the U.S. election last year, some Western politicians have put part of the responsibility — and the blame — for "fake news" on tech magnate Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, the company he co-founded.

Fringe websites and political blogs that spread false information are boosted on Facebook and other social networks by an army of political supporters, in some cases even "bots" programmed to spread the message.

Eager to show it is tackling the problem, Facebook rolled out a tool in Germany to let journalists spot false news when it is flagged by Facebook users. Since April, Facebook has partnered with investigative journalists to fact-check material shared on the social network.

First in Germany to partner with the Silicon Valley giant is investigative news organization Correctiv, which started a website called Echtjetzt — or, Really now? — to debunk false information during the election campaign. “We check the web for bulls--t,” Karolin Schwarz, one of Correctiv’s new hires, said.

The results of this experiment, so far, are mixed. While Correctiv's fact-checkers contend that the tool helps, they said they are still in the dark about how the social network compiles the list of posts to be reviewed.

Facebook’s fact-checking tool is “very often not relevant” and doesn’t explain how a story is gaining traction on the social network, said Jacques Pezet, a journalist who worked with the tool for the newspaper Libération during the French elections and recently joined Correctiv’s fact-checking team to cover the German race.

“We check the web for bulls--t” — Karolin Schwarz of Correctiv

As the tool requires a second team of fact-checkers, independent from Correctiv, Facebook doesn't remove stories flagged as "fake" by Correctiv. For its part, Correctiv publishes new articles on their own website debunking stories it believes are false.

A Facebook spokesperson said it is “testing and are in close conversations with the ecosystem on how the product is best [deployed],” stressing it hasn’t been fully rolled out yet. The spokesperson said the German version was still just "a test."

The company didn't disclose technical details on how it compiles the list of stories, nor how it assesses whether a potentially false story is gaining traction on its social media site. It said a story flagged as false "might show up lower in your feed," but didn't provide much more detail.

Race for shares

Facebook first used the tool to allow users to report stories as misleading during the French presidential race.

“We’re working on better ways to hear from our community and work with third parties to identify false news and prevent it from spreading on our platform,” Adam Mosseri, the company’s VP responsible for the news feed, wrote when the initiative was launched in April.

Tucked away on the second floor of a renovated industrial building in the central Mitte area of Berlin, a handful of Correctiv fact-checkers now uses the tool to work through a list of flagged Facebook posts. The Echtjetzt project got a €100,000 grant from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.

Among the sites being closely tracked by Correctiv are a couple dozen blogs and alternative media websites that hit on nationalist tones similar to popular movements on the right, including the Pegida movement and, more recently, the Alternative for Germany party. As well as Politically Incorrect News, or PI News, which has for some time published stories on migration and Islam, others under scrutiny include Anonymousnews.ru and New-York-based conservative think tank Gatestone Institute.

PI News and the Gatestone Institute did not respond to requests for comment. Anonymousnews.ru did not have contact details on its pages but redirected readers to the Swiss website Express Zeitung, which claimed no affiliation with the website.

Asked whether they only focus on right-wing websites, Pezet said, "We get that question a lot. The alt-right is actually more organized." The alt left lacks popularity, the French fact-checker added, and "most fake news is about [traditional right-wing topics like] immigrants, refugees and security. It's rare we have fake news about nuclear energy."

Many articles that, according to Correctiv's fact-checkers, contained false information get several hundred thousand shares or impressions on Facebook, making them difficult to counter. Successful fake news stories “have simple answers to complex questions,” Schwarz said. “This works — just like cat videos.”

A new report by the University of Oxford investigated what German fact-checkers may be up against, finding that "the majority of the misinformation pages identified were politically right, and xenophobic, nationalist, pro-Pegida, pro-AfD and Islamophobic content was common."

While in the U.S. the debate has frequently been hijacked by automated “bots,” computer scripts that spread propaganda across a series of automated user accounts across the social web, Germany deals more with vocal supporters of fringe movements who spread fake stories.

The EU has also been targeted by German disinformation efforts: Countdown, a Christian-inspired blog writing mainly about migration, recently gained traction with an article recycled from 2015 and based on anonymous sourcing that claimed the EU intends to scrap euro notes and coins by 2018. (Germany is a cash-rich society, with individuals carrying an average of €103 on them at any given time.)

Threat of legislation

Other media outlets are trying to tackle the problem on their own.

At the network of local public broadcasters ARD, four employees have been keeping an eye on election-related fake news stories since April. In February, public broadcaster ZDF announced its own dedicated election fact-checking initiative: a campaign on social media and on news website heute.de to flag stories containing false information.

Patrick Gensing, who leads ARD’s fact-checking team, said they have no plans to cooperate with Facebook.

“Facebook should take responsibility for the content” flagged by users, he said. He added that Facebook is “not very transparent” about how it deals with the issue.

German politicians are putting pressure on Facebook to acknowledge and fix misinformation itself. In December, Green member of parliament Renate Künast filed a complaint for a false quote that made the rounds on the social media network.

If fact-checking initiatives fail, the German government has demonstrated it is prepared to legislate to curb what it sees as the rise of false information spread by social media.

German politicians are also putting pressure on Facebook to acknowledge and fix misinformation itself.

The new German platforms law goes beyond anything attempted by other Western governments to curb content on social networks in the past year.

In the U.S. Facebook added 3,000 employees to the 4,500-strong team of people checking content every day, Zuckerberg announced in May. It followed outrage over a series of live-streams by Facebook users that showed people committing suicide or broadcasting violence.

Politicians in other European countries including the U.K. and France have squarely backed making Facebook accountable for letting terrorist networks and criminal content thrive on their pages. Three recent terror attacks prompted the British government to increase pressure on Facebook and others to fight terrorist networks that spread hate-inciting messages on social media. The French government lent its support to the idea more recently and the EU has nudged Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and Google's YouTube to deliver on their promises to push back against radicalization online.

But contrary to criminal content like ISIS promotional videos and child pornography, the "fake news" debate is shrouded in obscurity over what is real, what is not and who decides which is which.

In his 6,000-word-long letter that Facebook employees refer to as "the Manifesto," Zuckerberg pleaded for patience to figure out how best to respond to fake news. "We are proceeding carefully because there is not always a clear line between hoaxes, satire and opinion. In a free society, it's important that people have the power to share their opinion, even if others think they're wrong."