Looks like the Chinese government would like to ensure that its citizens do not fall victim to 'fake news' and has thus taken on the responsibility of 'fact checking'.
If the Communist party decided to replace all online censorship with modals saying how wrong the website was, and you could just click through the modal, I would consider that progress in China.
I don't give breaks to golden parachutes or to lobbied appointments.
Reply to below: I am not talking about government censorship, which is obvious, since I just talked about it. I am talking about companies using fake news as an excuse to block what they believe is fake news.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_China
Or are you talking about in the West? (Why ask for extant examples for things that are being proposed, but not yet enacted, regarding fake news?)
I'm not well read on this topic but I would like to be. I've never heard this solution presented, likely due to my lack of research. Can you provide citations of this solution being suggested and/or implemented?
Besides that, while I agree it is better than pure blocking I still feel it would be a government over-reach. I wouldn't like a company doing it either.
So China has been fact checking for twenty years longer than the internet has existed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Taiwan https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2016/taiwan
Ruling party: Taiwan's president is indeed from the Democratic Progressive Party. [1]
Self identification: More than 80 percent of respondents self-identified as Taiwanese, compared with 8.1 percent who identified themselves as Chinese and 7.6 percent who identified as both. [2]
Fully democratic: Not only does Taiwan have open elections and tolerate political demonstrations even the US wouldn't, but people have had referendum powers since 2003. This power was used stop the building of casinos in Penghu despite the moneyed interests pushing for them: [3]
1) http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35336411
2) http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2016/05/28/20...
3) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-15/casinos-r...
Today Taiwan has a ridiculous number of political parties (nearly 300) with 3-4 of them actually having seats in the house, tho effectively Taiwan is a 2 party country with sweeping swings in number of seats and leadership between the Democratic Progressive Party and the Chinese National Party.
Thats the only difference.
china presents an image that is almost North Korean to the rest of the world, even though this is far from the truth. The current leadership, which came of age during the cultural revolution, is even worse than the previous leaders in this regard, and they probably don't realize how bad they look (with the fake hair dye, but everything else also).
If Wen Jiaobao's family didn't accumulate so much wealth, why would they have blocked nytimes in the first place? It must be true, they never even tried refuting the facts presented in theat seminal article.
So is China.
> Introduced by Congressmen Adam Kinzinger and Ted Lieu, H.R. 5181 seeks a “whole-government approach without the bureaucratic restrictions” to counter “foreign disinformation and manipulation,” which they believe threaten the world’s “security and stability.”
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-24/obama-signs-counter...
But instead of controlling the media they want to fund their own "fact-based" counter propaganda by building centralized media strategies with input from across the government, including the intelligence agencies, department of energy, state, etc. Additionally they want to partner and fund private firms, NGOs, and local journalists to help them.
> The first priority is developing a whole-of-government strategy for countering THE foreign propaganda and disinformation being wages against us and our allies by our enemies. The bill would increase the authority, resources, and mandate of the Global Engagement Center to include state actors like Russia and China as well as non-state actors. The Center will be led by the State Department, but with the active senior level participation of the Department of Defense, USAID, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the Intelligence Community, and other relevant agencies. The Center will develop, integrate, and synchronize whole-of-government initiatives to expose and counter foreign disinformation operations by our enemies and proactively advance fact-based narratives that support U.S. allies and interests.
> Second, the legislation seeks to leverage expertise from outside government to create more adaptive and responsive U.S. strategy options. The legislation establishes a fund to help train local journalists and provide grants and contracts to NGOs, civil society organizations, think tanks, private sector companies, media organizations, and other experts outside the U.S. government with experience in identifying and analyzing the latest trends in foreign government disinformation techniques. This fund will complement and support the Center’s role by integrating capabilities and expertise available outside the U.S. government into the strategy-making process. It will also empower a decentralized network of private sector experts and integrate their expertise into the strategy-making process.
It's not clear how explicit this will be. Hopefully it will be obvious, so the public doesn't have to then invest in identifying the US propaganda, which is countering Russian/China propaganda.
H.R. 5181 establishes a Global Engagement Center, funds it, creates an official in charge of it who works for the Board of Broadcasting Governors and makes them immune to civil law.
With the passage of the resolution, the Executive Branch is empowered to reinterpret prior domestic propaganda protections so that American citizens that do not believe official US narrative can be engaged/targeted by influence operations.