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Comment by wybiral | Hacker News Reader

Independent fact checking seems like a great idea. Discrepancies in news stories should absolutely be pointed out. But I'm hesitant about the idea of having an "established party to assess the accuracies of what is being said".

Are we supposed to censor stories that this party designate as being fake? Who should oversee such a thing? What qualifies as "news"?

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An algorithm that points out discrepancies in news coverage is an interesting idea. Then it could just label discrepancies and let the audience judge each piece of coverage in context for themselves.

Unless a 3rd party fact checker is an open-sourced algorithm I doubt anyone will accept their definition of 'fact' and 'fake'. Even then someone could game it.

Sort of related, newsdiffs.org is useful for telling when the New York Times silently edits articles, which can be pretty substantial sometimes.

There are certain real world institutions which are authoritative for certain data under their domain. Tax data, citizenship status, crime statistics, demographics statistics etc...

A US law mandating the formation of such an organization was enacted over the Christmas break.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countering_Foreign_Propaganda_...

In all fairness, it does not establish a censor. It establishes an organization for: a) studying propaganda and b) producing [counter-]propaganda. Seems like a reasonable response, as long as it doesn't go up to censorship, "information sovereignty" or any similar monstrosities. The US has played the propaganda game in the past, what it doesn't do often is political censorship, it doesn't look to me like the CFPDA changes that.

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