But if you want some examples, have a look round the UK political punditry scene for anti-Corbyn articles from before the election, many of which look much less credible now.
-a lot about what was written in the presidential election last year seems to have been wishful thinking or meant to influence not inform. And this is from somebody who doesn't like Trump.
- Swedish police has no-go zones, firefighters gets attacked - journalists keeps telling everything is fine.
- and bad reporting from the Middle east has plenty of crazy examples. (Journalist: "Israelis, the most advanced army in the area, actually tries to kill civilians". Fact is of course, for anyone who bothers to think for 15 seconds that if the Israelian army tried to kill civilians then I must say they have failed spectacularily.)
> Swedish police has no-go zones, firefighters gets attacked - journalists keeps telling everything is fine.
This still isn't true. There are many legitimate issues with integrating immigrant populations into fairly insular and homogeneous societies. People lying about the magnitude of those problems really, really discredit efforts to make them better though.
Swedish police are incredibly well trained.. it's absurd to think they've just abandoned parts of major cities, especially when those cities are safer than most large cities in the US.
Malmo, the 'center' of all of the alleged police no-go zones has a murder rate equal to that of San Diego.. It's 90% lower than the murder rate in Chicago. The overall murder rate is dramatically lower than the rate in the US:
It's really bizarre how the right wing in the US has chosen Sweden as the symbol for their refugee distrust when there's very little evidence that their problems are anything more than those seen by every major city with large impoverished populations of any background.
To be frank, it's surprising someone would ask for "non-anecdotal evidence" of journalists discrediting themselves. It manifestly happens fairly regularly.
("most of their day" is hyperbole obviously, but still).
They make no mention that any malware was found in this email and I seriously doubt that anybody would be stupid enough to make a spear phishing attack so obvious and suspicious. Who in his right mind would click confirmation link on an invitation to a service he didn't request?
As I see it, there is zero evidence that it wasn't just some random idiot typing this publicly known email address into the signup form but they don't even consider such a mundane possibility.
James Andrew Lewis, the expert they quote, appears to be more of a politician than technologist.
The new Russia doesn’t just deal in the petty disinformation, forgeries, lies, leaks, and cyber-sabotage usually associated with information warfare. It reinvents reality, creating mass hallucinations that then translate into political action. Take Novorossiya, the name Vladimir Putin has given to the huge wedge of southeastern Ukraine he might, or might not, consider annexing. The term is plucked from tsarist history, when it represented a different geographical space. Nobody who lives in that part of the world today ever thought of themselves as living in Novorossiya and bearing allegiance to it—at least until several months ago. Now, Novorossiya is being imagined into being: Russian media are showing maps of its ‘geography,’ while Kremlin-backed politicians are writing its ‘history’ into school textbooks.
Problem is, Novorossiya indeed existed on the territory of modern Ukraine. There is an English Wikipedia article on it dating back to 2005 and I've even confirmed it with a dead tree book from the '80s.
I guess the above doesn't really pass as evidence that "most journalists spend their days discrediting themselves", but it does show that at least sometimes they are pretty happy to skimp on fact checking and basic sanity if a story fits whatever narrative they personally believe.
Looks like a lot of people on social networking sites are missing out on some easy cash here. Why pay $50,000 to discredit one when their opponents on Twitter/Reddit/wherever (or heck, even themselves through stupid comments) will do it for free?
I'm not clear on how effective such a campaign promises to be. But assuming that folks wouldn't pay if they couldn't get something out of it, what does this tell us about democracy? Do we need to throw out either democracy or freedom of speech?
I think engagement is part of the problem - many people are very eager to spot "gotchas!" of their opponents, rather than taking a more broad and measured view.
And educational achievement doesn't seem to be any barrier to the acceptance of bogus news - even being a leader in one field doesn't make you immune to disinformation from an unrelated quarter, and in fact we see this every day.
I assume education would encompass critical thinking, allowing for the neutral evaluation of multiple sides of an issue, and a critical eye toward the veracity of facts and news consumed.
Critical thinking is all well and good, but I'll hazard a guess that it won't help - many people know it but only apply it selectively.
On the other hand, I can't help but think comment threads like this amount to nothing more than "voting for the other guy is so illogical, clearly my vote is the correct one". A slightly veiled way to call anyone who doesn't vote your way stupid.
Not at all. I don't blame a single person who voted for Donald Trump (disclaimer: Bernie Sanders was "my" candidate); Trump made promises, and people voted for those promises. The fault lies with his failing his base, not the base itself.
Now, if he runs again and people still vote for him after he's lied and broken most of his campaign process, that can't be fixed, in which case maybe democracy is broken.
One counterargument to this reasoning is that many of his promises are for policies that, according to the best available evidence, are counterproductive.
If the base consistently votes for things like “get tough on crime!” or “keep drugs illegal!” or “spend a lot of money building a giant wall!” or “institute a travel ban on questionable legal and national security grounds!”, I think there’s a strong case to be made that there’s some sort of issue affecting the base. Where the issue lies, and which people / organizations are at fault, is the thornier question. (Is it inequities in education? Is it propaganda, good old FUD campaigns, or a failure of the media? Poverty? Drug abuse? Political disenchantment caused by corruption or widening inequality? The legacy of institutionalized racism?)
All of which is to say: I don’t think his base is solely to blame; far from it. We do, however, need to understand why people vote for useless / counterproductive policies, and for the people that espouse them, when we should collectively know better. If we're not willing to face this question, democracy is already broken.
The problem I see here is that your definition of counterproductive might not match mine.
Maybe I think punishment is important for moral reasons so longer prison sentences are something I favor. That's not exactly a logic level issue, that's not a media issue, that's a moral decision I've made. Just because my view of the world differs from yours doesn't make it less valid, maybe I made a decision based on my conscience or upbringing instead of on pure economic or improving lives grounds. I don't think that makes the decision less valid. Many such policies can be viewed in this light.
If we’re making decisions that could have been predicted, on the basis on known scientific evidence, to lead to measurably worse outcomes, I’d argue that does indeed make those decisions less valid.
There’s a troubling tendency these days to discredit scientific expertise, or to mischaracterize it as partisan. It’s insane to imagine that we can forever hide behind arbitrary (and, often, deeply problematic) value systems to ignore the available expertise, knowledge, and data. You can't move water uphill with morality.
I would argue that all the people yelling "gotcha" aren't actually involved. Anything more than a superficial understanding see through that. Many of the people shouting "gotcha" can name their governor or congressional reps, and how many don't know about their local/state reps?
If they can't name more than one or two key people how involved are they?
Involvement is larger more complex issue. (So is education, but I am not touching that one for now)
In practice many places have outlawed various forms of lying effectively. Look at Canada and their false advertising laws or UK's defamation laws. Neither are perfect, both have some unintended side-effects but neither elected trump.
I think the more practical issue is how to get laws to keep the people who make laws from lying. I don't how to get there from here. I think we might be in a position where we either get a market solution or bust.
EDIT - Of course I totally discounted any problems with censorship and these are real issues that I just presumed there will be some way to deal with.
I'm fairly certain that it's impossible to effectively ban lies in the general case. There are way too many things that are subject to some sort of interpretation - there are always fuzzy edges.
There's a meme on facebook that's been huge for awhile, about how people need to start listening to science. This shows a fundamental misunderstanding about how science operates in the real world. There will always be judgment calls about what constitutes a valid experiment, what results to discard because they're obvious tainted, etc., right down to the arbitrary choice of a threshold "p<0.05".
In philosophy we might try to paint things as black and white, but in the real world it almost never turns out to be so clear.
EDIT: there's another flaw that I think may itself be fatal. That is, the ability to use this as a SLAP tool. Even if your opponent isn't lying, you can tie them up in the courts long enough to keep them out of the running. Thus, the folks with deep pockets and can afford lawyers will cement their control.
I agree with most of what you say, except for the implicit presumption that the general case is important. We don't need to ban all lies, we just need to stop some. Perhaps prohibit news organizations from lying; then we only need to figure out how to do that without falling into censorship.
I agree with you entirely that science is unfairly characterized. We need some more Mythbusters. They were doing science, perhaps with less rigor than people like, but how much rigor do you need to know you can't clean a cement with truck with 2 tons of RDX weapons grade explosives? It is cool to know that 1 stick of dynamite will clear a thin casing of cement sometimes.
I think it would do a great deal of good just spreading the the ideas that you can learn things by trying stuff while observing the world and sometimes ideas you already hold might be wrong (and you know this when your "knowledge" contradicts reality).
> Perhaps prohibit news organizations from lying; then we only need to figure out how to do that without falling into censorship.
That's an interesting idea, though it then leaves a few very difficult questions that would need answering. Namely:
1. Who's a news organisation/journalist (this is already an incredibly controversial point as is)?
2. How do you prove intent? Because you could easily defend lies as mistakes on the organisation's part, which could serve as a get out clause for everything but obvious 'fake news' sites.
3. As well as perhaps the issue of who is actually within reach of your laws. The internet is global and the laws on it are localised as well.
I don't have any strong suggestions on point 3, but there are some tools we could leverage for the other two. We have done things like this for other industries and sometimes it works well.
First, we need a list of news companies that self identify as such. Second, we need a group of people who aren't the executive or legislative branch to act as watchdogs with a solid set of rules, next we laws stating what the punishments are for lies and finally we need to limit who can say they provide "News".
We have a number of non-profit groups for those that self-identify as journalists. Some of those help organize or train people. A new one could be created or one of those could create a listing of self identifying news companies. If that is unsuitable (and the FCC weren't our enemy) then the FCC could directly maintain such a list. We Good success creating such lists, consider Voting Testing Labs (labs that test voting machines), none are run by the government, but they all follow government rules.
If non-profits or private groups are doing the list keeping then they have extra leverage to kick out news organizations s, but that is not strictly required. As long as someone can de-list a news company for extreme violation and punish for minor ones. This could be the courts, but doesn't have to be as long its it is not the people making the laws or holding the lists. A consortium of people from the industry would likely be an ideal list keeper, and they could also make rules without getting the involved too much.
Then we need clearly spelled rules on "lying". It doesn't have to actually be lying, which requires intent, it can be a level of habitual innacuracy on a given topic. It doesn't matter if it was intentional, but if your news org kept saying something demonstrably false about one candidate or one topic the watchdogs will jump in and try to leverage the rule to punish that news org. Bonus points if we can somehow get the news companies to be watchdogging each other, again the cosortium of news organizations could help with this.
Then finally "news" companies that cannot play with this kind of oversight don't get to use the word "News" to describe themselves, or in Trademarks, Logos or Names. We could also incentive people to become news organizations by providing tax breaks and using groups like the ad council to tout the advantage of news companies over entertainment companies. It would take a long time before we trusted it, but in the long I think something like this could create a stable self-correcting governing for responsible news reporting. We might have parts of this already I only have superficial knowledge that industry, this is largely transplanting ideas from other places.
>In practice many places have outlawed various forms of lying effectively. Look at Canada and their false advertising laws or UK's defamation laws. Neither are perfect, both have some unintended side-effects but neither elected trump.
When the government has laws to suppress "lying", but also gets to determine what constitutes a lie, you've pretty much abandoned any pretence of liberal democracy.
So Canada is not a democracy because it bans False advertising and the UK is not a Democracy because it has strong Libel Laws?
Perhaps you are omitting some checks or balances. In both countries one group makes the laws and another interprets them. Both are the "government" and nominally the same group but are put in power different ways, held to different standards of accountability and often controlled by opposing political parties.
When the government gets to decide both 1) when something is false and 2) when false things are not allowed to be said, it's really only a question of time.
Canada, in particular, is already notorious for its foray into Human Rights Commissions that punish you saying things that make other people unhappy. I wouldn't live there.
Freedom of speech purism is probably unworkable. I'm old enough to remember people arguing that spam was free speech and that spamfighting was immoral.
Fake news is much more sophisticated than spam but is ultimately going to encounter the same fight.
Today, we have a big 10 situation where 95% of all email travels through 10 hosts... gmail, live, aol, yahoo, etc. Email was designed to be open to all, but thanks to the spam fighting tactics employed, we ended up with all the power concentrated in the hands of a few.
We lost nntp entirely, but that wasn't due to spam. The copyright industry shut it down under the premise of "think of the children."
http was designed to allow anyone to run a server, but thanks to asymmetric bandwidth and port blocking, it's all hosted on the NSA cloud.
It hasn't been a good two decades for free speech. The only fight we won was crypto, and they're coming after that again.
NNTP is still alive, with basically the primary purpose of disregarding copyright.
The talk groups are all abandoned for web forums with UX that people end up preferring (I understand that NNTP allows choice of client and people are going to explain how much better that is; over here in the reality experiment, the abandonment already happened).
Some combination of spam and usability was already killing NNTP in the very early 2000s. Really it was replaced by phpbb; easier to deploy a new board without the social bureaucracy of USENET, easier to administer. On NNTP it was hard to establish authenticity of posters, hard to ban people, hard to filter spam, and hard to do community moderation.
What I think free speech purists don't acknowledge is the huge amount of volunteer emotional labour that goes into making communities work and defending against toxic posters and harmful content. Almost all audiences prefer curated communities.
A small set of hosts intersecting with those 10 also ditched their netnews newservers because of, as you say, "think of the children." The abandonment was by the ISPs, not so much the users.
95% of a full NNTP server feed was pr0n warez and spam - particularly in alt. - but the remaining 5% in for ex comp.* and sci.* is sorely missed and yes, to my neighbor replies, the nnrp clients _were_ more useable and useful than the broadly dispersed grains of unrelated phpbb servers we have now [this para is admittedly anecdata based on my time as a newsadmin\",
I have said for many years now that before anyone can vote they need to take a test. It's a dead simple 5 question T/F test. And you only have to get 3 right to vote.
And to add: That reason is that democracy (voting) is not (primarily, although it often follows) about correctness of result, but about people's interests being represented.
True, but morally it's much better to try to bring everyone up to an acceptable level of political understanding, than to exclude people for the lack of that understanding, especially since ignorance wouldn't really be their own fault.
I believe we don't have a land-owners only voting scheme because of our current landlord situation. Should a majority of our population not get a say in votes because they either won't or can't afford land?
> States Parties shall guarantee to persons with disabilities political rights and the opportunity to enjoy them on an equal basis with others, and shall undertake:
> a) To ensure that persons with disabilities can effectively and fully participate in political and public life on an equal basis with others, directly or through freely chosen representatives, including the right and opportunity for persons with disabilities to vote and be elected, inter alia, by:
> i. Ensuring that voting procedures, facilities and materials are appropriate, accessible and easy to understand and use;
> ii. Protecting the right of persons with disabilities to vote by secret ballot in elections and public referendums without intimidation, and to stand for elections, to effectively hold office and perform all public functions at all levels of government, facilitating the use of assistive and new technologies where appropriate;
> iii. Guaranteeing the free expression of the will of persons with disabilities as electors and to this end, where necessary, at their request, allowing assistance in voting by a person of their own choice;
Sure, that's the law. But we were talking philosophy. Should a comatose person vote? How about someone who hasn't the wits to draw the 'x' on the ballot? There's a whole spectrum. At some point, the potential for abuse of such people is as large as the harm in preventing them from voting.
See how complicated it is? A bunch of legal citations doesn't come near the issue.
I get where you are coming from but it all depends what is on the test.
Although it would be inefficient my ideal situation would be that before casting your vote you have to read each parties manifesto, answer a few questions to prove you've read it (if you fail, you repeat until it's sure you understand the policies each party is putting forward), and then you cast your vote fully informed of what it actually means.
An examination of Chinese, Russian, Middle Eastern, and English-based underground fake news marketplaces reveals a wide range of services available on these portals
How laudable that the propaganda for hire industry is so multicultural.
unless you're going to do full censorship there is no cure, the MSM is clearly against trump in the election which could be decisive in the past, the social network dared to disagree this time and actually made a difference, but, what is wrong then, let them compete and people will know where to turn to, remember, majority of them have already made their mind no matter what, it's the middle ground that is affected.
Since this is HN, the bigger question is how much of this can be automated? For example, you go to one of those sites, fill out a form, pay in bitcoin, and let the system do the rest?
A 12-month campaign of fake promises, ruthless hypocrisy and BS interpretation of reality (which has been the standard for decades) has comparable costs...
The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case. - Thomas Paine
I think voting rights and electoral integrity is more important than fake news (i.e. propaganda) which has been around forever and isn't going away.
73 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadBut if you want some examples, have a look round the UK political punditry scene for anti-Corbyn articles from before the election, many of which look much less credible now.
-a lot about what was written in the presidential election last year seems to have been wishful thinking or meant to influence not inform. And this is from somebody who doesn't like Trump.
- Swedish police has no-go zones, firefighters gets attacked - journalists keeps telling everything is fine.
- and bad reporting from the Middle east has plenty of crazy examples. (Journalist: "Israelis, the most advanced army in the area, actually tries to kill civilians". Fact is of course, for anyone who bothers to think for 15 seconds that if the Israelian army tried to kill civilians then I must say they have failed spectacularily.)
This still isn't true. There are many legitimate issues with integrating immigrant populations into fairly insular and homogeneous societies. People lying about the magnitude of those problems really, really discredit efforts to make them better though.
Swedish police are incredibly well trained.. it's absurd to think they've just abandoned parts of major cities, especially when those cities are safer than most large cities in the US. Malmo, the 'center' of all of the alleged police no-go zones has a murder rate equal to that of San Diego.. It's 90% lower than the murder rate in Chicago. The overall murder rate is dramatically lower than the rate in the US:
https://imgur.com/a/wKh0X
It's really bizarre how the right wing in the US has chosen Sweden as the symbol for their refugee distrust when there's very little evidence that their problems are anything more than those seen by every major city with large impoverished populations of any background.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media...
Later part of Iraq war trend really takes a dive.
To be frank, it's surprising someone would ask for "non-anecdotal evidence" of journalists discrediting themselves. It manifestly happens fairly regularly.
("most of their day" is hyperbole obviously, but still).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/the-life-and-death-...
They make no mention that any malware was found in this email and I seriously doubt that anybody would be stupid enough to make a spear phishing attack so obvious and suspicious. Who in his right mind would click confirmation link on an invitation to a service he didn't request?
As I see it, there is zero evidence that it wasn't just some random idiot typing this publicly known email address into the signup form but they don't even consider such a mundane possibility.
James Andrew Lewis, the expert they quote, appears to be more of a politician than technologist.
edit:
And some verified fake news:
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/ru...
The new Russia doesn’t just deal in the petty disinformation, forgeries, lies, leaks, and cyber-sabotage usually associated with information warfare. It reinvents reality, creating mass hallucinations that then translate into political action. Take Novorossiya, the name Vladimir Putin has given to the huge wedge of southeastern Ukraine he might, or might not, consider annexing. The term is plucked from tsarist history, when it represented a different geographical space. Nobody who lives in that part of the world today ever thought of themselves as living in Novorossiya and bearing allegiance to it—at least until several months ago. Now, Novorossiya is being imagined into being: Russian media are showing maps of its ‘geography,’ while Kremlin-backed politicians are writing its ‘history’ into school textbooks.
Problem is, Novorossiya indeed existed on the territory of modern Ukraine. There is an English Wikipedia article on it dating back to 2005 and I've even confirmed it with a dead tree book from the '80s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novorossiya
edit:
I guess the above doesn't really pass as evidence that "most journalists spend their days discrediting themselves", but it does show that at least sometimes they are pretty happy to skimp on fact checking and basic sanity if a story fits whatever narrative they personally believe.
I'm not clear on how effective such a campaign promises to be. But assuming that folks wouldn't pay if they couldn't get something out of it, what does this tell us about democracy? Do we need to throw out either democracy or freedom of speech?
And educational achievement doesn't seem to be any barrier to the acceptance of bogus news - even being a leader in one field doesn't make you immune to disinformation from an unrelated quarter, and in fact we see this every day.
On the other hand, I can't help but think comment threads like this amount to nothing more than "voting for the other guy is so illogical, clearly my vote is the correct one". A slightly veiled way to call anyone who doesn't vote your way stupid.
Now, if he runs again and people still vote for him after he's lied and broken most of his campaign process, that can't be fixed, in which case maybe democracy is broken.
If the base consistently votes for things like “get tough on crime!” or “keep drugs illegal!” or “spend a lot of money building a giant wall!” or “institute a travel ban on questionable legal and national security grounds!”, I think there’s a strong case to be made that there’s some sort of issue affecting the base. Where the issue lies, and which people / organizations are at fault, is the thornier question. (Is it inequities in education? Is it propaganda, good old FUD campaigns, or a failure of the media? Poverty? Drug abuse? Political disenchantment caused by corruption or widening inequality? The legacy of institutionalized racism?)
All of which is to say: I don’t think his base is solely to blame; far from it. We do, however, need to understand why people vote for useless / counterproductive policies, and for the people that espouse them, when we should collectively know better. If we're not willing to face this question, democracy is already broken.
Maybe I think punishment is important for moral reasons so longer prison sentences are something I favor. That's not exactly a logic level issue, that's not a media issue, that's a moral decision I've made. Just because my view of the world differs from yours doesn't make it less valid, maybe I made a decision based on my conscience or upbringing instead of on pure economic or improving lives grounds. I don't think that makes the decision less valid. Many such policies can be viewed in this light.
There’s a troubling tendency these days to discredit scientific expertise, or to mischaracterize it as partisan. It’s insane to imagine that we can forever hide behind arbitrary (and, often, deeply problematic) value systems to ignore the available expertise, knowledge, and data. You can't move water uphill with morality.
I don't think most people have ever actually voted FOR a candidate in their life. Most people vote AGAINST candidates.
And if the candidate you voted against loses, then there is no subsequent validation of how they did in office, because they weren't in that office.
If they can't name more than one or two key people how involved are they?
Involvement is larger more complex issue. (So is education, but I am not touching that one for now)
I think the more practical issue is how to get laws to keep the people who make laws from lying. I don't how to get there from here. I think we might be in a position where we either get a market solution or bust.
EDIT - Of course I totally discounted any problems with censorship and these are real issues that I just presumed there will be some way to deal with.
There's a meme on facebook that's been huge for awhile, about how people need to start listening to science. This shows a fundamental misunderstanding about how science operates in the real world. There will always be judgment calls about what constitutes a valid experiment, what results to discard because they're obvious tainted, etc., right down to the arbitrary choice of a threshold "p<0.05".
In philosophy we might try to paint things as black and white, but in the real world it almost never turns out to be so clear.
EDIT: there's another flaw that I think may itself be fatal. That is, the ability to use this as a SLAP tool. Even if your opponent isn't lying, you can tie them up in the courts long enough to keep them out of the running. Thus, the folks with deep pockets and can afford lawyers will cement their control.
I agree with you entirely that science is unfairly characterized. We need some more Mythbusters. They were doing science, perhaps with less rigor than people like, but how much rigor do you need to know you can't clean a cement with truck with 2 tons of RDX weapons grade explosives? It is cool to know that 1 stick of dynamite will clear a thin casing of cement sometimes.
I think it would do a great deal of good just spreading the the ideas that you can learn things by trying stuff while observing the world and sometimes ideas you already hold might be wrong (and you know this when your "knowledge" contradicts reality).
That's an interesting idea, though it then leaves a few very difficult questions that would need answering. Namely:
1. Who's a news organisation/journalist (this is already an incredibly controversial point as is)?
2. How do you prove intent? Because you could easily defend lies as mistakes on the organisation's part, which could serve as a get out clause for everything but obvious 'fake news' sites.
3. As well as perhaps the issue of who is actually within reach of your laws. The internet is global and the laws on it are localised as well.
First, we need a list of news companies that self identify as such. Second, we need a group of people who aren't the executive or legislative branch to act as watchdogs with a solid set of rules, next we laws stating what the punishments are for lies and finally we need to limit who can say they provide "News".
We have a number of non-profit groups for those that self-identify as journalists. Some of those help organize or train people. A new one could be created or one of those could create a listing of self identifying news companies. If that is unsuitable (and the FCC weren't our enemy) then the FCC could directly maintain such a list. We Good success creating such lists, consider Voting Testing Labs (labs that test voting machines), none are run by the government, but they all follow government rules.
If non-profits or private groups are doing the list keeping then they have extra leverage to kick out news organizations s, but that is not strictly required. As long as someone can de-list a news company for extreme violation and punish for minor ones. This could be the courts, but doesn't have to be as long its it is not the people making the laws or holding the lists. A consortium of people from the industry would likely be an ideal list keeper, and they could also make rules without getting the involved too much.
Then we need clearly spelled rules on "lying". It doesn't have to actually be lying, which requires intent, it can be a level of habitual innacuracy on a given topic. It doesn't matter if it was intentional, but if your news org kept saying something demonstrably false about one candidate or one topic the watchdogs will jump in and try to leverage the rule to punish that news org. Bonus points if we can somehow get the news companies to be watchdogging each other, again the cosortium of news organizations could help with this.
Then finally "news" companies that cannot play with this kind of oversight don't get to use the word "News" to describe themselves, or in Trademarks, Logos or Names. We could also incentive people to become news organizations by providing tax breaks and using groups like the ad council to tout the advantage of news companies over entertainment companies. It would take a long time before we trusted it, but in the long I think something like this could create a stable self-correcting governing for responsible news reporting. We might have parts of this already I only have superficial knowledge that industry, this is largely transplanting ideas from other places.
When the government has laws to suppress "lying", but also gets to determine what constitutes a lie, you've pretty much abandoned any pretence of liberal democracy.
Perhaps you are omitting some checks or balances. In both countries one group makes the laws and another interprets them. Both are the "government" and nominally the same group but are put in power different ways, held to different standards of accountability and often controlled by opposing political parties.
Canada, in particular, is already notorious for its foray into Human Rights Commissions that punish you saying things that make other people unhappy. I wouldn't live there.
Fake news is much more sophisticated than spam but is ultimately going to encounter the same fight.
We lost nntp entirely, but that wasn't due to spam. The copyright industry shut it down under the premise of "think of the children."
http was designed to allow anyone to run a server, but thanks to asymmetric bandwidth and port blocking, it's all hosted on the NSA cloud.
It hasn't been a good two decades for free speech. The only fight we won was crypto, and they're coming after that again.
The talk groups are all abandoned for web forums with UX that people end up preferring (I understand that NNTP allows choice of client and people are going to explain how much better that is; over here in the reality experiment, the abandonment already happened).
What I think free speech purists don't acknowledge is the huge amount of volunteer emotional labour that goes into making communities work and defending against toxic posters and harmful content. Almost all audiences prefer curated communities.
95% of a full NNTP server feed was pr0n warez and spam - particularly in alt. - but the remaining 5% in for ex comp.* and sci.* is sorely missed and yes, to my neighbor replies, the nnrp clients _were_ more useable and useful than the broadly dispersed grains of unrelated phpbb servers we have now [this para is admittedly anecdata based on my time as a newsadmin\",
Easier said than done!
Would you protect their vote? Or are they subhuman and not allowed to take part in democracy?
Particularly article 29: https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/convention-...
> States Parties shall guarantee to persons with disabilities political rights and the opportunity to enjoy them on an equal basis with others, and shall undertake:
> a) To ensure that persons with disabilities can effectively and fully participate in political and public life on an equal basis with others, directly or through freely chosen representatives, including the right and opportunity for persons with disabilities to vote and be elected, inter alia, by:
> i. Ensuring that voting procedures, facilities and materials are appropriate, accessible and easy to understand and use;
> ii. Protecting the right of persons with disabilities to vote by secret ballot in elections and public referendums without intimidation, and to stand for elections, to effectively hold office and perform all public functions at all levels of government, facilitating the use of assistive and new technologies where appropriate;
> iii. Guaranteeing the free expression of the will of persons with disabilities as electors and to this end, where necessary, at their request, allowing assistance in voting by a person of their own choice;
But also:
https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/convention-...
https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/convention-...
https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/convention-...
https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/convention-...
https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/convention-...
See how complicated it is? A bunch of legal citations doesn't come near the issue.
It isn't an obvious thing though, determining intent when it isn't clearly and plainly expressed.
To be fair, the point was never that they were subhuman.
Yours is a loaded question.
Although it would be inefficient my ideal situation would be that before casting your vote you have to read each parties manifesto, answer a few questions to prove you've read it (if you fail, you repeat until it's sure you understand the policies each party is putting forward), and then you cast your vote fully informed of what it actually means.
How laudable that the propaganda for hire industry is so multicultural.
by giving him billions in free air time?
They really tried hard to help every other candidate but ended up playing right into his hands.
Given what people think about the current president this says quite a lot about media.
I think voting rights and electoral integrity is more important than fake news (i.e. propaganda) which has been around forever and isn't going away.