Fake News May Not Be Protected Speech | Hacker News Reader

Fake News May Not Be Protected Speech

bloomberg.com

27 pointsadventured70 comments

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?

He can go back on anything on our side, whether it makes any sense or not. That's one of the problems with going around Congress.

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 have to believe most people just don't think about issues beyond a surface level.

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.

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....

bias as long as it goes along my opinion and world view.. this is why it's dangerous.

seem more like an attempt to control what news are okayd vs not.

id rather fake news get lawsuits that have to prove it

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.

> However, lying should be discouraged. Heavily.

People are also into 'healing-crystals' and 'prayer' should we do something about those as well?

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.

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.

What do you do when some group, like 4chan trolls, decide to go upvote garbage or downvote a legitimate journalist?

Interesting concept, but what gives readers any authority to vote on the truthfulness of a story?

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.

So pretty much Facebook likes? People vote on what matches their worldview.

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.

So they reject things they wish weren't true. Same deal.

Oh please.

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.

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.

That's exactly my point?

(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?)

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?

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.

NPR sussed out what looks to me like "FNaaS" (Fake News as a Service (tm))[1]. The company's called "Disinfomedia".

Does FNaaS constitute shouting fire in the crowded theatre that is FB?

[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503...

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?

> Who is to judge what is or isn't in the public interest?

Er, judges? For all the histrionics, they've traditionally done pretty well with 1A cases.

To my knowledge they don't judge in line with the public interest, but with the law, and shouting fire is not against the law.

Annihilating a family owned pizzeria as a satanic pedophile front for Clinton is pretty close to yelling 'fire' isn't it?

No. Because there is no clear and immediate danger.

There is massive harm done by an intentional lie to a non public figure for no reason.

Would you consider that a good outcome?

Obligatory Popehat: https://popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-hackne...

reposting a shadowbanned account's comment that is relevant to this:

> Like the Rolling Stone's fake rape story?

What's all the hubbub about fake news now? We've always had fake news: The Onion, Not Necessarily the News, Fox News...

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.

This. Is. Why. Free. Speech. Exists.

No, the fake news thing is a bunch of Macedonian teenegers who are trying to make money. They readily admit it. https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became...

That's where it started, I don't think the mainstream media wants it to end there though.

There is Standing Rock drama ongoing for months. You would not know about it following so call 'real news' media. Enough said about fake news.

And villan Facebook is only way you get news about events like these.

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.

[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...

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.

I hear you but you missed my point.

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.

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