Lol! So, this means MSNBC,CNN,NBC,cbs,CNBC and all the others are not free speech? I refuse to read whatever this article contains. The biggest offenders of contrived,FAKE news have been the people that we have trusted. There is no such thing as journalism when it comes to the people who are being churned out by our American colleges, they are useless opinionated, closed minded, biased, paid off stooges for our government. The fact that this is some kind of "news" is part an parcel to the problems inherent to the free flow of information Among the media of the US.
The 2016 election was a pinnacle that demonstrated unequivocally as to how our current news organizations determine what is news and what is not. These institutions are making every attempt to redeem themselves as truthful reporters of fact when we all know that they are nothing more than bought and paid for, low IQ clowns. You look at a guy lone Wolf Blitzer.. this guy is known the world over as some spectacle when in fact he is a complete idiot.
Go away troll. Take your pseudo intellectual position with you and come back with our big boy pants and some real informaton besides your PR, propaganda crap
This kind of equivocation is exactly why we're in this mess to begin with. Yeah, the mainstream networks are not perfect. But they're not in the same league as Brietbart, which in turn is not in the same league as a chain-facebook post stating that the Pope had endorsed Trump.
Words do matter, and they do have a bearing on the real world. Every news story out there is falsifiable (or identifiable as an opinion piece.) For every news source, you can tally a scorecard of how accurate they are.
You can't just equivocate truth away by arguing about who is a clown and who isn't.
But you're doing it again. You're bringing emotion and "us vs them" and "good guys vs bad guys" to what ought to be (as much as possible) an objective analysis of facts.
MSM has been openly doing this for two decades now. They poisoned their own well which why they are getting ready to run to the government to craft legislation to protect themselves after such a horrendously off-the-mark Clinton obsession.
By "clinton obsession" do you mean the coverage of her email "scandal" more than any other political topic combined? Yeah, that was absolutely a media failure.
But the answer is to hold media accountable, not to throw truth under a bus and promulgate nonsense with the excuse of "the other tribe is just as bad!"
This behavior exactly matches something described by Sartre in the last century. Replace "anti-semite" with "Trump supporter" in the following passage and it is strikingly on point:
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.
Rolling Stone's fake rape story to double down on the feminist (and thus pro-Clinton) narrative?
Complete MSM involvement to sell the war in Iraq?
As far as I'm concerned, as long as MSM acts as the executive branch's lap dog, it should be considered an official wing of the government and should qualify for constitutional regulation just like the other branches.
The Iraq war weapons of mass destruction fabrication was and is far more damaging than anything Breitbart et al could ever hope to conjure up and the MSM were 100% complicit. It was clear, at the time, to anyone with even the remotest capability for critical thought that the whole thing was a fabrication in order to have a pre-tense for an illegal invasion and war yet they each and every one of the major publishers went along with it.
But they were receiving reports directly from the government.
Do you honestly believe that the WMD discussions were on the same level as "Hillary keeps killing her aides and Bill keeps covering it up" stories? Or "Trump keeps molesting 13 year old girl" stories?
I can't imagine anyone being able to defend these as being in the same category.
They aren't in the same category, the Iraq ones were so much worse. They cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives. The death toll is still rising more than a decade on.
> They aren't in the same category, the Iraq ones were so much worse. They cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives. The death toll is still rising more than a decade on.
What? Am I missing something? I mean what exactly is the press supposed to do when the pentagon and the whitehouse are reporting on WMDs? There was conflicting information and it was terrible that they lied about that shit, but is that CNNs fault?
Seriously though, what would you have them do? How would you have them verify that information ahead of time?
And why do you think it's on the same level as completely false information that's easily refutable?
Maybe they could actually investigate claims instead of repackaging government press releases? Pretty much everyone in the world knew how bullshit all those WMD claims were except for America and it's media (and to a lesser extent, UK and Australia).
The media were essentially cheerleading the invasion and deserve their chunk of responsibility for the invasion and it's fallout.
I'll agree more in-depth investigation was warranted. The end-result fallout was/is still incredible, and if the media could have played a part in preventing and or mitigating the war in Iraq, it definitely would have been a definite good thing.
However, on the "fake-news" front, do you really consider the government misleading the press in 2002/2003 to be on the same scale as the widespread adoption of the recent tabloid-quality news?
From the studies and reports I've been reading lately, it sounds like the election was heavily swayed by the online equivalent of the national enquirer.
What concrete evidence leads you to think this is true? What is it about the process that produces "mainstream" journalism that you think makes it more reliable than something like Breitbart?
Because it doesn't even pretend to serve the truth instead of a particular agenda. "We are the platform of the alt-right" are words Bannon has used, verbatim.
This bias is evident in even a cursory analysis of their headlines on any given day. They ran virtually no stories critical of Trump during the election, and mentioned every single salacious speculation about Clinton.
As far as I can tell, they are very nearly the definition of a partisan, biased news organization (i.e, propaganda).
And I'm going to go ahead and preempt your "but the MSM is worse!!" response. First of all, it's not. The stories it chooses to cover are demonstrably more diverse than those of Breitbart, and any bias is much more subtle.
But even if it did have the same sort of agenda, saying that "CNN is just as bad" doesn't in any way justify that kind of behavior from anyone else. We all need to be doing better. We can't buy into the epistemological relativism that allows us to say that fake news isn't an issue, no matter where it's coming from. Truth is real and truth matters.
I agree with you for the most part. But I invite you to consider why we put so much instinctive faith in NYT/CNN/etc., especially on political topics. What have they done to earn our trust? The fact that they have a neutral tone does not speak to their accuracy. There is big talk about neutralness and impartiality, but do we know that there are effective practices to enforce these things? Have we closely considered the process that produces their content and determined that it maximizes accuracy? I have almost never seen anyone arguing in these terms.
I see no reason to believe that standard journalistic practice leads to high accuracy. Consider that the NYT encourages writers to fit stories to a predetermined narrative:
"By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line."
http://deadline.com/2016/11/shocked-by-trump-new-york-times-...
Furthermore, consider journalistic practice around quotations--an area where newspapers would want to be extraordinarily accurate, because quotes are easily verified and people expect them to be verbatim. On the contrary, it is standard practice to give paraphrastic, i.e. incorrect, quotations:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=6200
None of this is to say NYT is worse than Breitbart, based on my personal judgment. But being better than Breitbart is a pretty low bar. My point is, on what basis do we privilege the old, established media?
I agree with your sentiment, though you may want to change your tone to make it more appropriate for HN.
I really do fear that this "fake news" scare will lead to widespread censorship. There is no scientific or objective standard for determining "truth" in news, especially when most "news" now is really opinion packaged as fact.
And now we have Facebook introducing censorship tools to allow them to re-enter the Chinese market, but it seems that the tools will be used in the US as well based on Zuckerberg's latest statements about cracking down on unharmonious news stories.
It's being cultivated solely to establish a form of control that isn't formal government censorship. The establishment has been looking for a good way to censor the Web and more broadly the Internet, almost since it took off in popularity. The direct censorship route has always been practically impossible in the US, so getting the big platforms - the social networks especially - to get in line under the guise of "fake news" (or hate speech with a constantly shifting definition) is an ideal method to destroy freedom of speech online. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn, Google are all on-board. It's likely that nothing can turn it back now, those platforms will get increasingly aggressive in their restrictions on the speech they deem acceptable (only that which agrees with their world-view or ideologies). The next question is what they'll do to stop the alternative platforms that will be created in response to the 'censorship.'
I'm starting to think that the best way to preserve free speech online is for the government to take active steps to promote it: either by nationalizing Twitter/Facebook, or establishing a public platform of its own.
The analogy to shouting "fire" isn't appropriate. There is a public interest balance when it comes to speech. The more public the interest, the more liberty you can take with the truth. Falsely shouting "fire" involves no public interest. All it does is harm. But saying the president is a Lizard-person from Mars ... that actually involves something of great public interest; the honesty of a politician. No court will step into that question. No court will trample on someone's right to say any manner of untruths about a politician.
The flip side to this is speech about non-public persons. You can call the president a lizard, but say the same about his kids and you expose yourself to slander liability. False news about non-public persons is already regulated.
Freedom of speech is about the government not locking you up. Private lawsuits are a totally different paradigm.
Who is to judge what is or isn't in the public interest? Is a song that shouts fire illegal? not protected? The fire argument always gets made, but is shouting fire actually illegal or even regulated?
That is not the same issue. There has been coverage of the Standing rock protests in all the major media outlets, the story dies because in part because of how it is presented (Native Americans notion that their idea of sacred ground isn't shared by the current legal holders of that ground) and in part because the risk of pipeline leakage relative to other risks (train derailments[1], coal plants dumping into rivers[2], the EPA uncorking tailing ponds[3])
Thus for much of the country they hear : "These protesters, with no compelling reasons, are preventing work on a pipeline that will help make your oil and gas prices stay low and create jobs for drillers and oilmen in the Dakotas."
And the story falls flat on its face and nobody picks it up again. If anyone involved in the protest wants to get any traction at all on that story they need to figure out a way to get regular people angry about it.
First there is barely any, what is happening there is military style intervention that same media would happily report if it was happening somewhere else.
And secondly, when it gets reported, it is heavily spinned with corporate interests in mind. Protesters are not crazy, unreasonable people. They've been justified with recent accidents that happened, which is exactly what they were warning about.
When protesters block roads and burn property you get a big police response, it happened in Ferguson it's happening in Standing Rock.
The difference in news coverage depends on WHY people are blocking streets and burning things.
In Ferguson the viewing/reading/listening public could relate police killing an unarmed black civilian by a nearly all white police force with race relation issues.
In Standing Rock the people viewing/reading/listening to the news from there cannot relate to people demonstrating against a project that has met every legal obligation and answered every legitimate challenge. The folks on the ground don't like it, but the rest of the world doesn't seem to care that they don't like it.
Nobody has been able to explain why we should care. And don't say "gee the police could do some military style intervention on you too!" which I would totally expect if a few hundred of us start burning things and blocking the roads. Explain to the public, like they are 5, why they should prefer to stop this pipeline rather than to build it.
It's impossible to automatically determine truth when something is published. "The Pope endorses Trump for president" was the archetype of the fake story, but it is impossible to distinguish between that and being the first publication to break the story. While I've seen the stats on these circulating on FB, I'm unconvinced that most of these fall into this category. To me, this must be 100% false with no possibility of interpretation for news to be "fake".
Biased News (whether you think CNN/NYTimes/Breitbart is the worst of this doesn't matter) is protected. Take the NYTimes reporting of WMDs in Iraq: It was dumb how easily they accepted the US Government line. I disagreed at the time, and still do, but it's hard to see that as deliberately publishing things they knew to be fake.
Unprovable Conjecture stories ("pizzagate"/"Trump is a Russian plant" depending on your leanings) is something that I think is really damaging to sensible discourse and an informed electorate. "Fake News" is a distraction from this, which is something I think is the real problem.
Technically, how do you know "The Pope endorses Trump for president" is fake without contact the Pope's office for verification? You can't just say it looks obviously fake so it is fake.
What I find more troubling than this whole "fake news" scare is subtle, hard to detect bias that is quite common in the media. This can be done by omitting some facts, through the use of words that bring up negative or positive emotions, or through the use of less than objective sources. It's harder to call out than obviously made up and unsupported stories, and even if somebody would read such criticism, it's easy to ignore because the story is not clearly wrong.
There is also an obvious echo chamber in the media and this current focus on fake news is its perfect example.
Bias I can put up with, so long as it is not supported by fabricated facts.
That I have friends who are more conservative when presented with the same facts that I can see doesn't bother me. In particular, it is likely a place I should take notice and get a better understanding of the situation.
When the beliefs are based on complete nonsense and they are not open to discussing how what they are pushing is just flat out false....
That is the thing. I have and will continue to be wrong on things. This is why I genuinely believed that maybe Clinton had done something. There are absolutely zero facts there, though.
Let me be clear. I do not get upset with people that voted independent. Or didn't vote. I'm as disenfranchised as you can get. The people that bother me are the ones that somehow genuinely believe trump. Or push anti-evolution education. Or refuse to acknowledge racism/bigotry.
> Bias I can put up with, so long as it is not supported by fabricated facts.
I am inclined to say the 'effect of fake news' on the election is a fabricated fact.
It's not like 4-chan and bad subreddits happened yesterday - they just needed some convenient strawman to attack after Hillary lost; I'm certainly no fan of trump but it's sad to see otherwise intelligent people gobbling this up..
I think I agree that most fake news had no effect. But I still view fake news as The Onion. Mostly a comedic effect. However, having seen that some folks actually trust brietbart (spelling?), I am left speechless.
It is defended as being "like The Onion," yet also compared to serious news sources. Biased maybe, but also serious and holding themselves to facts.
And I get the difficulty. Being wrong is not necessarily lying. However, lying should be discouraged. Heavily.
Do you actually have something actionable in this comment?
I mean, at an actionable level, "healing-crystals" should be labeled factually as to their efficacy. And "prayer" should be encouraged as a way to keep you thinking about things you are not acting on.
So, should we "do something about them?" I am not pushing for banning of any activities. I'm not even hiding behind "free speech" as a shield. I did misspeak, though. I do not necessarily want to discourage lying. What I do want to do is encourage truth.
This is one of the reasons that "changed their minds" doesn't bother me. Everyone has likely been wrong about something in their life. Confronting that truth is not easy. And should be celebrated.
Do I like being called out for having been wrong? No. Not even a little. It is a painful experience. Am I glad when it happens. Absolutely. I am a better person for it.
Sounds good to me. Trump should appoint a Secretary of News whose job it is to determine "fake news". How does Bannon sound to you?
Trump will be one of the best things that happened to free speech and civil liberties. President Obama was so smart and benign that many people felt comfortable giving up protections on free speech and civil liberties. It is a lot easier now to convince people for the need to protect free speech now that Trump will be in charge. These protections for free speech were created because the founders knew that you would not always get the wise and good people in charge. These protections are for when foolish and authoritarian people get into power.
This is why I think these "fake news" pushes to limit free speech are foolish. People are sharpening a very sharp knife for censorship, baring their chest, and handing it to Trump who will have the Presidency, Congress, and soon the courts. You are free to do this, but no one will be sympathetic to you when Trump stabs you in the heart by banning your speech because it is "fake news".
Let me give you something more concrete to think about. What will be your response when Trump and his EPA say that global warming is "fake" and ban all mention of of global warming as "fake news". After all, fake news is not protected speech.
There in lies the fault line, if we do "regulate free speech" (that sounds chilling, but I'm keeping an open mind), who decides what is truth and falsehood? For things like climate change and evolutionary theory, these are well established agreed on facts in the scientific community, but for current events, who can be the arbiter of truth? Certain things are clear cut at least in time("protestors were bused in"), others, not so much ("reaganomics of the 1980's was a good thing").
I still feel like our best bet is still education and to instil a sense of intellectual curiosity in people.
I agree with you. Even setting aside the human rights angle for the sake of argument (and it should NOT be set aside), limitations on the press, of any kind, are a wickedly sharp two-edged sword and can swing back viciously on any would-be wielder.
But I don't think that's actually what we should focus on. The problem isn't that some teenage anarchist can write and post conspiracy theories for whoever wants to believe them; the problem is that, if they are sensational enough, they can travel around the world a million times and entirely outpace any counter-argument or retraction.
This is a moral harm. It harms people who are being exposed to these falsehoods and who (for one reason or another) are not in a position to accurately and skeptically judge their merit.Not to beat a dead horse, but how many Catholics voted for Trump because they thought he had the Pope's endorsement? That isn't right or fair, not for the Pope, not for Catholics who were lied to, and not for the country.
I don't think the solution is a matter of policy; I am staunchly against the formation of any sort of "ministry of truth." But I do think this is a serious societal issue that ought to be addressed at a technical, educational and sociological level. We technologists created the circumstances where this has become a problem: I believe it is incumbent upon us to think about how we can solve it in a way that respects free speech.
People should be able to say whatever they want, but we need to make sure that we haven't created an environment where objective truth can't even exist. It does, and it needs to be accessible.
> but how many Catholics voted for Trump because they thought he had the Pope's endorsement?
The Catholic press and Clergy had been condemning Clinton as unelectable because of her stances on abortion and other issues for four to five months. But nobody outside of the Catholics themselves really cared. The only news the mainstream news cared about was the flawed polling numbers.
Also the WikiLeaks emails that showed the DNC created fake Catholic front groups to try and agitate a 'Catholic Spring' sent shock waves around the entire Catholic press worldwide. It was all over at that point.
Trying to blame the Catholic vote on 'fake news' is a strawman.
The people who need to be educated about the dangers of 'fake news' are the people complaining about it. Censorship of 'fake news' is far more destructive and a threat to society and free speech then a few crappy websites that pump out tabloid nonsense for clicks. Civilization has been dealing with false and misleading print since the invention of the written word. Its nothing new and people have the faculties to understand and discount it.
Even more concrete: Obama granted himself the authority to make a treaty without Senate approval. Sounded fine to most people at the time, because Congress was just "obstructing" everything anyway.
Now Trump has that power. I wonder how he'll use it?
(Aside from the obvious, which is to dismantle the Iran deal. That's bad enough, because it means our promises now only last as long as the current administration.)
Can Trump actually dismantle the Iran deal? The deal was not just between the US and Iran. It was between the US, the UK, Russia, France, China, Germany, the EU and Iran.
If the US pulls out and reimposes sanctions, will those other countries go along? Or will they continue trading with Iran, and if they do, will that provide enough trade that US sanctions won't really have much of an impact on Iran?
This is one thing I still have a hard time understanding about people. I understand that hypocrisy and the like are baked deeply, inextricably into our DNA, but the thing is we've all witnessed this stuff happen time and again and without fail still choose to let it happen again.
People get on board with giving up power because it will work out for their team _this_time_. The thing is, it will absolutely be used against your team in the future. This has been proven time after time after time (just in recent history, not even considering the whole of human history). It will be used against you. It's not like smoking or other unhealthy behavior that will have an effect far into the future but that you can't really grasp fully...you just need to remember all of the other times it has happened in your lifetime to know what it feels like.
I don't think you realize the people gave up power generations ago. It doesn't matter what the people want now or even if they want or do not want to give up power. The power was given up to the government when it was formed and forever it will stay there until the government is destroyed by violence. We've seen this over and over again and know this to be the state of things. I don't understand what pretending the people have any power left gets you. The only power the people still seem to have is the power to vote (not very powerful, IMO) and of referendums and other state initiatives. These are the powers that were given to the people in exchange for people giving up the rest of their powers (except as otherwise legislated). If you want to talk about people regaining or not giving up power, you are necessarily talking about violence and rebellion on the scale of a civil war. I don't think anyone wants either of those and even for people that do, it's likely unwise to talk about it on the Internet.
As far as free speech, the original topic of this post, IMO, it doesn't exist when people are afraid to speak out and right now, many people are terrified to silence.
Let's be clear - this whole "false news" thing is the liberal, elite press reacting against independent thinkers who dare question the narrative they are trying to push.
I wonder if you could create a journalist certificate system which allowed you to sign your news stories with your journalist's private key. Then places like facebook and twitter could check the registry to see if you were in fact a "certified" journalist. Then people who read your stories could vote for or against their truthfulness.
The sign up process would be open to anyone, with or without degrees or training, but it would require enough information and be costly enough that you wouldn't have people send out a fake story get banned, get a new cert, and do it again.
I don't doubt there are people out there who don't "write the news" for a living who would be outstanding journalists and those who do that would get banned for their lack of accuracy.
The idea being that in the past a brand such as the New York Times would carefully manage its journalists such that its content was viewed as accurate and authoritative, it has in the past loudly fired employees who "broke the code". Aggregators like Google and Facebook and Twitter could use the 'newsy score' to trend stories from respected journalists and de-emphasize or spike stories from discredited or non-journalists.
Good question, other journalists could vote on each other? That would present challenges if WaPo decides they want to collude to torpedo the top journalist at NYT.
Perhaps a system where readers could 'endorse' or 'reject' a story and if a rejection threshold is reached it is evaluated double blind by a randomly selected pool of journalists with an accreditation score higher than some threshold (perhaps adjustable by the accreditation score of the challenged journalist as well). If a simple majority of the reviewers uphold the rejection it gets noted, and perhaps the accreditation score gets reduced of the journalist reporting poorly.
I'd have to run some simulations on that to see how whether that would be workable or result in overworked 'reviewing' journalists just rejecting or accepting everything enmasse.
A I mentioned below I'm wondering if it might work better if rather than likes you focused on "rejections" or people who felt the story was false. That would subject it to review and that would then trigger more rigorous inspection.
It's easy to justify tyranny. All you have to do is find something important but imperfect, call it a "failure", and ignore all the ways your alternative can fail in much worse ways.
Even better is to leave your alternative unstated, so nobody can counter it.
This sounds crazy... you have the left blaming 'fake news' and actually toying with the idea of censorship, in an era where Donald Trump and Bannon run the country. -- Open the gates for censorship and propaganda warfare on our own people isn't far behind. -- Do we seriously have politicians and people calling for censorship, going AGAINST freedom of speech, and a President who could start internment camps? -- How far are we away from becoming 1939 in Germany?
76 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadThe 2016 election was a pinnacle that demonstrated unequivocally as to how our current news organizations determine what is news and what is not. These institutions are making every attempt to redeem themselves as truthful reporters of fact when we all know that they are nothing more than bought and paid for, low IQ clowns. You look at a guy lone Wolf Blitzer.. this guy is known the world over as some spectacle when in fact he is a complete idiot.
Go away troll. Take your pseudo intellectual position with you and come back with our big boy pants and some real informaton besides your PR, propaganda crap
Words do matter, and they do have a bearing on the real world. Every news story out there is falsifiable (or identifiable as an opinion piece.) For every news source, you can tally a scorecard of how accurate they are.
You can't just equivocate truth away by arguing about who is a clown and who isn't.
You're right. MSM is worse because it openly works with the authority sector as an unofficial department of the executive branch.
Fake news also means the intentional timing of pieces, intentional coverage allocation, and intentional nonmentions of inconveinent facts in my book.
But the answer is to hold media accountable, not to throw truth under a bus and promulgate nonsense with the excuse of "the other tribe is just as bad!"
This behavior exactly matches something described by Sartre in the last century. Replace "anti-semite" with "Trump supporter" in the following passage and it is strikingly on point:
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.
- Sartre, "Anti-semite and Jew", 1944
Rolling Stone's fake rape story to double down on the feminist (and thus pro-Clinton) narrative?
Complete MSM involvement to sell the war in Iraq?
As far as I'm concerned, as long as MSM acts as the executive branch's lap dog, it should be considered an official wing of the government and should qualify for constitutional regulation just like the other branches.
Do you honestly believe that the WMD discussions were on the same level as "Hillary keeps killing her aides and Bill keeps covering it up" stories? Or "Trump keeps molesting 13 year old girl" stories?
I can't imagine anyone being able to defend these as being in the same category.
What? Am I missing something? I mean what exactly is the press supposed to do when the pentagon and the whitehouse are reporting on WMDs? There was conflicting information and it was terrible that they lied about that shit, but is that CNNs fault?
Seriously though, what would you have them do? How would you have them verify that information ahead of time?
And why do you think it's on the same level as completely false information that's easily refutable?
The media were essentially cheerleading the invasion and deserve their chunk of responsibility for the invasion and it's fallout.
However, on the "fake-news" front, do you really consider the government misleading the press in 2002/2003 to be on the same scale as the widespread adoption of the recent tabloid-quality news?
From the studies and reports I've been reading lately, it sounds like the election was heavily swayed by the online equivalent of the national enquirer.
Doesn't that bother you?
What concrete evidence leads you to think this is true? What is it about the process that produces "mainstream" journalism that you think makes it more reliable than something like Breitbart?
This bias is evident in even a cursory analysis of their headlines on any given day. They ran virtually no stories critical of Trump during the election, and mentioned every single salacious speculation about Clinton.
As far as I can tell, they are very nearly the definition of a partisan, biased news organization (i.e, propaganda).
And I'm going to go ahead and preempt your "but the MSM is worse!!" response. First of all, it's not. The stories it chooses to cover are demonstrably more diverse than those of Breitbart, and any bias is much more subtle.
But even if it did have the same sort of agenda, saying that "CNN is just as bad" doesn't in any way justify that kind of behavior from anyone else. We all need to be doing better. We can't buy into the epistemological relativism that allows us to say that fake news isn't an issue, no matter where it's coming from. Truth is real and truth matters.
I see no reason to believe that standard journalistic practice leads to high accuracy. Consider that the NYT encourages writers to fit stories to a predetermined narrative:
"By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line." http://deadline.com/2016/11/shocked-by-trump-new-york-times-...
Furthermore, consider journalistic practice around quotations--an area where newspapers would want to be extraordinarily accurate, because quotes are easily verified and people expect them to be verbatim. On the contrary, it is standard practice to give paraphrastic, i.e. incorrect, quotations: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=6200
None of this is to say NYT is worse than Breitbart, based on my personal judgment. But being better than Breitbart is a pretty low bar. My point is, on what basis do we privilege the old, established media?
I really do fear that this "fake news" scare will lead to widespread censorship. There is no scientific or objective standard for determining "truth" in news, especially when most "news" now is really opinion packaged as fact.
And now we have Facebook introducing censorship tools to allow them to re-enter the Chinese market, but it seems that the tools will be used in the US as well based on Zuckerberg's latest statements about cracking down on unharmonious news stories.
And that group, as it turns out, was the real hate target this election.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-pre...
(Unless of course not graduating from college makes someone a college graduate in the post-fact world.)
The flip side to this is speech about non-public persons. You can call the president a lizard, but say the same about his kids and you expose yourself to slander liability. False news about non-public persons is already regulated.
Freedom of speech is about the government not locking you up. Private lawsuits are a totally different paradigm.
Er, judges? For all the histrionics, they've traditionally done pretty well with 1A cases.
Would you consider that a good outcome?
And villan Facebook is only way you get news about events like these.
Thus for much of the country they hear : "These protesters, with no compelling reasons, are preventing work on a pipeline that will help make your oil and gas prices stay low and create jobs for drillers and oilmen in the Dakotas."
And the story falls flat on its face and nobody picks it up again. If anyone involved in the protest wants to get any traction at all on that story they need to figure out a way to get regular people angry about it.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=derailed+cars+leak+into+rive...
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=coal+plant+dumps+into+river
[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=epa+accidental+release+in+co...
And secondly, when it gets reported, it is heavily spinned with corporate interests in mind. Protesters are not crazy, unreasonable people. They've been justified with recent accidents that happened, which is exactly what they were warning about.
When protesters block roads and burn property you get a big police response, it happened in Ferguson it's happening in Standing Rock.
The difference in news coverage depends on WHY people are blocking streets and burning things.
In Ferguson the viewing/reading/listening public could relate police killing an unarmed black civilian by a nearly all white police force with race relation issues.
In Standing Rock the people viewing/reading/listening to the news from there cannot relate to people demonstrating against a project that has met every legal obligation and answered every legitimate challenge. The folks on the ground don't like it, but the rest of the world doesn't seem to care that they don't like it.
Nobody has been able to explain why we should care. And don't say "gee the police could do some military style intervention on you too!" which I would totally expect if a few hundred of us start burning things and blocking the roads. Explain to the public, like they are 5, why they should prefer to stop this pipeline rather than to build it.
Fake News != Biased News != Unprovable Conjecture.
It's impossible to automatically determine truth when something is published. "The Pope endorses Trump for president" was the archetype of the fake story, but it is impossible to distinguish between that and being the first publication to break the story. While I've seen the stats on these circulating on FB, I'm unconvinced that most of these fall into this category. To me, this must be 100% false with no possibility of interpretation for news to be "fake".
Biased News (whether you think CNN/NYTimes/Breitbart is the worst of this doesn't matter) is protected. Take the NYTimes reporting of WMDs in Iraq: It was dumb how easily they accepted the US Government line. I disagreed at the time, and still do, but it's hard to see that as deliberately publishing things they knew to be fake.
Unprovable Conjecture stories ("pizzagate"/"Trump is a Russian plant" depending on your leanings) is something that I think is really damaging to sensible discourse and an informed electorate. "Fake News" is a distraction from this, which is something I think is the real problem.
(In this case people did check and it was fake. But when it first arose there was no way to verify that - which is what I thought I said above?)
There is also an obvious echo chamber in the media and this current focus on fake news is its perfect example.
That I have friends who are more conservative when presented with the same facts that I can see doesn't bother me. In particular, it is likely a place I should take notice and get a better understanding of the situation.
When the beliefs are based on complete nonsense and they are not open to discussing how what they are pushing is just flat out false....
seem more like an attempt to control what news are okayd vs not.
id rather fake news get lawsuits that have to prove it
Let me be clear. I do not get upset with people that voted independent. Or didn't vote. I'm as disenfranchised as you can get. The people that bother me are the ones that somehow genuinely believe trump. Or push anti-evolution education. Or refuse to acknowledge racism/bigotry.
I am inclined to say the 'effect of fake news' on the election is a fabricated fact.
It's not like 4-chan and bad subreddits happened yesterday - they just needed some convenient strawman to attack after Hillary lost; I'm certainly no fan of trump but it's sad to see otherwise intelligent people gobbling this up..
It is defended as being "like The Onion," yet also compared to serious news sources. Biased maybe, but also serious and holding themselves to facts.
And I get the difficulty. Being wrong is not necessarily lying. However, lying should be discouraged. Heavily.
People are also into 'healing-crystals' and 'prayer' should we do something about those as well?
I mean, at an actionable level, "healing-crystals" should be labeled factually as to their efficacy. And "prayer" should be encouraged as a way to keep you thinking about things you are not acting on.
So, should we "do something about them?" I am not pushing for banning of any activities. I'm not even hiding behind "free speech" as a shield. I did misspeak, though. I do not necessarily want to discourage lying. What I do want to do is encourage truth.
This is one of the reasons that "changed their minds" doesn't bother me. Everyone has likely been wrong about something in their life. Confronting that truth is not easy. And should be celebrated.
Do I like being called out for having been wrong? No. Not even a little. It is a painful experience. Am I glad when it happens. Absolutely. I am a better person for it.
> Like the Rolling Stone's fake rape story?
Trump will be one of the best things that happened to free speech and civil liberties. President Obama was so smart and benign that many people felt comfortable giving up protections on free speech and civil liberties. It is a lot easier now to convince people for the need to protect free speech now that Trump will be in charge. These protections for free speech were created because the founders knew that you would not always get the wise and good people in charge. These protections are for when foolish and authoritarian people get into power.
This is why I think these "fake news" pushes to limit free speech are foolish. People are sharpening a very sharp knife for censorship, baring their chest, and handing it to Trump who will have the Presidency, Congress, and soon the courts. You are free to do this, but no one will be sympathetic to you when Trump stabs you in the heart by banning your speech because it is "fake news".
Let me give you something more concrete to think about. What will be your response when Trump and his EPA say that global warming is "fake" and ban all mention of of global warming as "fake news". After all, fake news is not protected speech.
I still feel like our best bet is still education and to instil a sense of intellectual curiosity in people.
But I don't think that's actually what we should focus on. The problem isn't that some teenage anarchist can write and post conspiracy theories for whoever wants to believe them; the problem is that, if they are sensational enough, they can travel around the world a million times and entirely outpace any counter-argument or retraction.
This is a moral harm. It harms people who are being exposed to these falsehoods and who (for one reason or another) are not in a position to accurately and skeptically judge their merit.Not to beat a dead horse, but how many Catholics voted for Trump because they thought he had the Pope's endorsement? That isn't right or fair, not for the Pope, not for Catholics who were lied to, and not for the country.
I don't think the solution is a matter of policy; I am staunchly against the formation of any sort of "ministry of truth." But I do think this is a serious societal issue that ought to be addressed at a technical, educational and sociological level. We technologists created the circumstances where this has become a problem: I believe it is incumbent upon us to think about how we can solve it in a way that respects free speech.
People should be able to say whatever they want, but we need to make sure that we haven't created an environment where objective truth can't even exist. It does, and it needs to be accessible.
The Catholic press and Clergy had been condemning Clinton as unelectable because of her stances on abortion and other issues for four to five months. But nobody outside of the Catholics themselves really cared. The only news the mainstream news cared about was the flawed polling numbers.
Also the WikiLeaks emails that showed the DNC created fake Catholic front groups to try and agitate a 'Catholic Spring' sent shock waves around the entire Catholic press worldwide. It was all over at that point.
Trying to blame the Catholic vote on 'fake news' is a strawman.
The people who need to be educated about the dangers of 'fake news' are the people complaining about it. Censorship of 'fake news' is far more destructive and a threat to society and free speech then a few crappy websites that pump out tabloid nonsense for clicks. Civilization has been dealing with false and misleading print since the invention of the written word. Its nothing new and people have the faculties to understand and discount it.
Now Trump has that power. I wonder how he'll use it?
(Aside from the obvious, which is to dismantle the Iran deal. That's bad enough, because it means our promises now only last as long as the current administration.)
If the US pulls out and reimposes sanctions, will those other countries go along? Or will they continue trading with Iran, and if they do, will that provide enough trade that US sanctions won't really have much of an impact on Iran?
People get on board with giving up power because it will work out for their team _this_time_. The thing is, it will absolutely be used against your team in the future. This has been proven time after time after time (just in recent history, not even considering the whole of human history). It will be used against you. It's not like smoking or other unhealthy behavior that will have an effect far into the future but that you can't really grasp fully...you just need to remember all of the other times it has happened in your lifetime to know what it feels like.
As far as free speech, the original topic of this post, IMO, it doesn't exist when people are afraid to speak out and right now, many people are terrified to silence.
This. Is. Why. Free. Speech. Exists.
The sign up process would be open to anyone, with or without degrees or training, but it would require enough information and be costly enough that you wouldn't have people send out a fake story get banned, get a new cert, and do it again.
I don't doubt there are people out there who don't "write the news" for a living who would be outstanding journalists and those who do that would get banned for their lack of accuracy.
The idea being that in the past a brand such as the New York Times would carefully manage its journalists such that its content was viewed as accurate and authoritative, it has in the past loudly fired employees who "broke the code". Aggregators like Google and Facebook and Twitter could use the 'newsy score' to trend stories from respected journalists and de-emphasize or spike stories from discredited or non-journalists.
Perhaps a system where readers could 'endorse' or 'reject' a story and if a rejection threshold is reached it is evaluated double blind by a randomly selected pool of journalists with an accreditation score higher than some threshold (perhaps adjustable by the accreditation score of the challenged journalist as well). If a simple majority of the reviewers uphold the rejection it gets noted, and perhaps the accreditation score gets reduced of the journalist reporting poorly.
I'd have to run some simulations on that to see how whether that would be workable or result in overworked 'reviewing' journalists just rejecting or accepting everything enmasse.
Does FNaaS constitute shouting fire in the crowded theatre that is FB?
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503...
Even better is to leave your alternative unstated, so nobody can counter it.