I'm sure this will be used for censoring political groups, and alternative media. As mainstream news sources become less popular / reputable they have really started pushing for methods to censor their opposition.
They were all over the (as far as I know) totally unverified document that an intelligence agency decided to leak to Buzzfeed for some reason.
They wonder why no one trusts them anymore...
...turns out it was because they were implicated in them.
Their most egregious breach of ethics to date: On October 31, 2016, the New York Times reported: "CNN has severed ties with the Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, after hacked emails from WikiLeaks showed that she shared questions for CNN-sponsored candidate events in advance with friends on Hillary Clinton's campaign." CNN said it had accepted her formal resignation on October 14, adding: "We are completely uncomfortable with what we have learned about her interactions with the Clinton campaign while she was a CNN contributor."
What exactly did CNN do wrong here ? By your definition every company that has a employee who makes an egregious mistake is corrupt.
You can't just say everyone is corrupt simply because on one specific day from one specific publication they failed to report their own corrupt behaviour.
So tell me again how they lost credibility by reporting the story as it is.
The New York Times, CNN, Guardian etc all reported the verified facts. Which is that a report was produced by an ex-MI6 spy looking into allegations that Russia had amongst others compromising video involving prostitutes/golden showers and President Elect Trump. This report was obtained by John McCain and passed to the FBI for verification. They didn't publish the report. They didn't publish the allegations. The presence and gist of the report is newsworthy because the spy in question has by all accounts impeccable credentials which McCain and the CIA/FBI made statements about. That is all they reported.
BuzzFeed were the ones who decided to publish the report and all of the above organisations heavily criticised them for it afterwards questioning their ethics etc.
The report was verified to be written by the ex-MI6 spy. The claims in the report are what are yet to be verified.
That just makes it worse, doesn't it? The actual allegations are so insane it's obvious they're fake. By hiding them, they make it appear credible.
So if they do publish the report (ie, Buzzfeed) then they get blamed for publishing false news.
If they report that the report was published, they get blamed for making it appear credible
I'll also point out that if they don't report things they get accused of being involved in a cover up.
What do you propose here exactly?
With the former, we have the press doing the job of internet trolls, shoveling serious allegations with absolutely zero evidence given.
Through a political lens it makes perfect sense, it's very sad, and I can't trust anything the main stream media tells me anymore. They've lost me forever unless there's a serious 'come to jesus' moment and they confess their bias and rectify it.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/09/fo...
[EDIT] (just to add something to my post)
If you delete/ommit/censor lies youd end up with:
a) If every lie is removed, maybe everything that was removed is a lie. Which is not true.
b) You end up with a "cry wolf situation", which may blow up hardly on facebook. You don't "cry wolf". You show that the wolf is there. Otherwise, the first time you screw up, you will lose all credibility.
To me, the ends don't justify the means.
(b) "hardly" means something other than what you're thinking. No worries, many Russians make that mistake when speaking english.
On the other hand, the biggest, most respected of the mainstream publications, the NYT and the WaPo, have permanently tainted themselves by acting as stenographers for US government disinformation campaigns -- most notably in the run-up to the Iraq war, when they consistently promoted the fake WMD story.
From Morning Joe, this morning, you can already see that the New York Times has learnt lessons from that era: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaI0u0ZdpMg
So the idea that they should still after all this time be permanently tainted is ridiculous and frankly is just an excuse by those who have different political persuasions.
Cokie Roberts is still employed, for example /snark
Sometimes it's Democracy Now!, a long-running counterculture mainstay that again presents an adversarial view and touches on subjects the mainstream media never would -- finding out about the Dakota Access Pipeline issue and reporting in depth months before the mainstream media deigned to grace it with even a moment of coverage.
Sometimes it's Breitbart. In those cases you are correct but 'alternative media' is an umbrella term that just means 'any group of people who do not behave as a mouthpiece for the political and economic elites'.
After the Telecommunications act of 1996 media has massively consolidated. At this point the 'mainstream media' refers to the media owned by those same 6 extremely powerful megacorporations that control all 'approved' 'serious' discussion. Alternative media means any alternate view.