Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts
blog.mass.gov
blog.mass.gov
Thankfully, we've learned a few things since then and liberal (classic definition, not American definition), democratic minded people know how dangerous government defined truth (no matter how simple or well accepted) is.
There is a cost to this, of course - the citizenry is required to have a level of sophistication and erudition and they will be forced to make nuanced and complicated judgements about the state of their world.
If you find that too high a bar to cross, a "ministry of truth" may sound attractive. Please grow up and resist that urge. It may help to read about twentieth century dictatorships and the history of modern, repressive regimes in general.
That doesn't mean that we need a Ministry of Truth a la Brazil or 1984, but this isn't an either-or issue. The Fairness Doctrine[0] was a fairly nice compromise. We have long required advertisers to be truthful, even using the extremely broad standard of "truth" set by the FTC. Why shouldn't news organizations be held to a similar ethical or moral standard? Does it benefit society if the only opinions broadcast as fact are filtered by corporate interests? That may be better than being filtered by government interests, but it's still not in the best interests of the public, is it?
Among other problems, the definition of "news organization" is completely fluid in this Internet era. What organization in particular gets a truth or balance mandate? Some? All? Which ever ones the censors consider most credible?
"Does it benefit society if the only opinions broadcast as fact are filtered by corporate interests?"
Not sure how you got here. Proposing news organizations obey some "truth" or "balance" conditions essentially is mandating state filtering.
The Internet, so far, has allowed a wider dissemination of ideas than ever before. Are you saying that organizations, on the net, large and small, broadcasting their views, is "corporate filtered news?" Seems like you're stretching things to say the least.
It's worth noting there doesn't need to be a corporate agenda or government conspiracy for humans to exhibit groupthink about ideas. Of course most of human history existed before The Age of Reason made evidence-based reason en vogue; but even today you can read about things like NASA engineers who said exactly how and when the Columbia shuttle would experience a critical foam strike, or scientists who were met with hostility and disparagement when trying to debunk the encyclopedic-, and textbook-published myth about komodo dragons injecting a cocktail of deadly bacteria sith their bites. It seems humans just exhibit this appeal to authority/consensus as an inherent trait.
The current climate of promoting democratization, diversity, and freedom except when it comes to democratization, diversity, and freedom of ideas seems to be taking a step backwards for humanity.
The other thing is, even though the media was always biased and agenda-driven, they weren't completely infiltrated by intelligence agencies and/or mega-corporations.
It's not a per-episode or per-program level, it's per-broadcaster. Also the fairness doctrine doesn't include (but worked in conjunction with) the Equal Time rule [1].
I don't know what the solution is. It's impossible and unreasonable to expect individual bloggers to hold the same standard as newspapers traditionally did. Maybe social networks could do something to educate readers?
It will not contain therein space for alternative thoughts on the main point let alone space for any alternatives for any unexamined assumptions.
Truth is multidimensional and fairness impossible to determine to everyone's satisfaction. For example 2 people discussing the best way to travel around the world are unlikely to find agreement with someone who believes the earth is flat and impossible to fly around and 2 different types of dating artifacts are equally meaningless to someone who believes the earth is 6000 years old.
Alternative viewpoints can find themselves a home in the comment section or if undesirable there on your own home on the web.
Wherein the web isn't censored in a heavy handed fashion we have the most reasonable answer to the fairness doctrine. Everyone can be heard but not everyone will find an audience that desires to listen.
But is that really reasonable or fair? What decides who will find an audience to listen to them?
Free speech advocates seem to believe that the "best" speech will always find an audience, but I don't personally see any reason to believe that's true.
When a rich person can pay for a political advert on a major television channel, and a poor person can only publish to a blog no one has any reason to know exists, do we really believe that the latter's ideas will spread more widely if they are "better"?
I think people are starting to realise that access to an audience is far more important than the simple freedom to say something, and that this access is already heavily restricted in a variety of ways other than government intervention. But unlike the mere ability to speak, access to an audience is fundamentally limited. It's physically impossible for everyone to hear everyone else's views. So a simple idea like "Freedom of Speech" is not sufficient to allow us to decide how to structure our societal discourse.
At best it gives an imprimatur of credibility to unreliable information. (E.g. as with the food pyramid, doctors' recommendations regarding salt and eggs, etc.)
And as the most established institution in society, that's precisely why the government should not indoctrinate narratives, directly or indirectly.
The right solution to bad free speech is more speech, not less.
All human history of progress goes against this claim.
We abolished slavery a few centuries ago.
Marijuana is being legalized in various countries and states.
etc.
> The Internet isn't going to magically change human nature.
On the contrary, civilization has always challenged "what is acceptable/right/wrong/etc". The internet is allowing us to accelerate this process with easier communication between and congregation of dissidents.
Slavery has never been abolished. It was simply made illegal in most places under most circumstances. By any definition of slavery there are more people in bondage today than at any time in the past.
Even taking your claim of abolition at face value, the only reason chattel slavery was "abolished" in the US was because its abolition became a way of ending a particularly bloody war by taking away one sides motive for fighting. Before that (i.e. before a majority of the citizenry saw abolition as benefitting themselves) there was not enough popular support for abolition.
That didn't work at all. It just made advertisers sneakier. They still lie as much as they can, and when they can't, use tricks to focus peoples attention elsewhere, or move the ad on a medium where they can lie.
Which is made easier when governments define and outlaw "fake" news. What separated us from totalitarian governments in the 20th century was we protected speech while hitler/stalin/mao/etc outlawed "fake news".
Do you really want Trump or Obama or Hillary or George Bush to have the power to limit speech? Do you really want either the republican or democratic party to define and outlaw "fake news"? Do you want corporate interests to ban "fake news"? Oil companies bribing politicians to label climate change as fake news? Drug companies bribing politicians to label the drug epidemic as fake news? I certainly don't.
This issue is not as cut and dry as you think. As Theo van Gogh said: a tolerant society can not be tolertant towards the intolerant.
And who, exactly, are these intolerant? Nazis? Communists? Black lives matter? All lives matter? NRA? PETA? Feminists? James Damore? Abolitionists? Abortionists?
No. It was called an election. Hitler and the nazis were banned in germany for a while. So banning "fake news" didn't keep hitler from power.
> The fake news Hitler banned was the “fake” according to the same standard as Trump: news he didn’t like.
That's the point. Do you want trump to be allowed to ban news he doesn't like? I don't. And what turn hitler from an elected official to a dictator was the german governments ability to ban "fake news". If hitler never had the ability to ban "fake news", then he would never have been able to cause the destruction he did because people would have been allowed to challenge, criticize and intellectually attack him.
> This issue is not as cut and dry as you think.
It is cut and dry. It's the foundational principle of all free society. It's why we never had a hitler, stalin or mao in the US and it's why we never will as long as free speech is guarded. Free speech is the only antidote to totalitarianism.
> a tolerant society can not be tolertant towards the intolerant.
That's an absurd contradictory logic fallacy. Think about it logically. If you are intolerant of the intolerant then you are the intolerant. Also, the US has 250 years track record debunking that logical fallacy. Besides, that's exactly what hitler said. That's exactly what stalin said. That's mao said. It's what all totalitarians say to justify stifling speech.
If we take a book from the 80s titled "How to Win at Chess" and try to update it for the 2010s, we have three choices:
1. Add the caveat: "Don't ever play against a computer."
2. Add an enormous chapter about how to use computers to play computer-aided chess which, if serious, would probably double the size of the book.
3. Assume that people smarter and more dedicated than the reader devote entire careers to making sure humans can play chess in an environment where it is difficult to cheat by using a computer.
In laymen's terms: sophistication and erudition just won't cut it. You have three choices:
1. give people a well-lit place to read news that cannot be attacked through the internet.
2. at least double the amount of education people need in order for them to make judgments in a digital world.
3. Assume this is a problem that dedicated career people must solve to keep the population from being trivially manipulated in 100 different ways by 100 different actors when they attempt to read the news.
Which are you advocating here?
Sure. But in the 80s you'd never meet a player who is several orders of magnitude better than anyone who has ever lived. That's important.
Similarly, in the 80s you'd never meet a group of political operatives who could read dossiers on tens or hundreds of thousands of people and tailor propaganda for them to read while in a doctor's waiting room, or wherever they happen to be. That's important.
We can't beat supercomputers at chess by practicing chess really hard. And we can't beat digital propagandists by thinking harder about what they publish.
The requirements for IPOs are important, they argue. Investor accreditation is important to prevent the naive masses from wasting their live-savings on snake-oil, they argue. "Please grow up and resist the urge" for unregulated securities, they argue.
I think both arguments generalize, which makes the contrast interesting. Is the SEC, in its role in preventing equity sales to unaccredited investors, a "ministry of truth", censoring some companies from speaking to people who would want to transact with them?
I would argue they're not, because they're not actually deciding who gets to sell equity. Anyone can sell equity—provided that party also discloses a whole bunch of information about itself. If it refuses to do that, then that party is restricted to only sell equity to people who are rich enough to not be risking much in an individual investment.
I think this could be a workable model for regulating the news media (including Joe random blogger.) If you're publishing to the world, then you have to disclose all the research that went into your piece. If you're unwilling to do that, then the state could have a right to in turn restrict where you can publish.
Whelp, there goes whistleblowing. Or generally any source that prefers not to be named. I think your proposal destroys some of the most important journalism.
Also, conclusions in journalism are not mathematical equations; they don't derive linearly from the facts. Who gets to decide whether that particular conclusion is or not supported by the facts?
Keep in mind, I’m not suggesting that the source would need to be named; I’m only suggesting that the data from the source would need to be able to be independently recollected from the same source.
In the example of a whistleblower, that would mean that the journalist would need to ensure that there was some secure anonymous route by which other journalists could get in contact with the same whistleblower to independently verify their story.
You wouldn't have done your job, as a journalist, until you had provided a reproducible way for someone else to come along and re-do your investigation without you, ending up with all the same facts, if not the same beliefs.
> Who gets to decide whether that particular conclusion is or not supported by the facts?
My proposal would be to separate journalism from editorial or opinionated conclusions. "The news" itself would only contain objectively-verifiable facts, without opinions; and then it would be the job of magazines, talk-shows, etc. to “interpret” the news, in much the same way the current news media itself currently interprets things like scientific papers.
In other words, “news” intended for the public would be trimmed down to the most boring and dry possible version of itself—like a cross between a wire service and a police scanner. Anything that wasn’t such, couldn’t legally be called “news”, nor could it suggest by its formatting that it is news. There would be a separation between "news" and "opinion" in about the same way there is an FDA-managed separation between "food" and "drugs"; and there would be public-awareness campaigns to make it clear that this division exists, and that any fact found in "opinion" sources that you haven't independently heard from a "news" source is suspect at best and more likely an active psy-op.
But, again, the state wouldn't be responsible for declaring who can or cannot publish (just like the FDA isn't responsible for saying who can or cannot manufacture drugs; and the SEC isn't responsible for saying who can or cannot sell equity.) The only job of this hypothetical MiniTruth would be to say—according to a very objective, independently calculable bar, determined by Congress—whether what a given party is publishing can legally be called "news" or not; and to punish parties that do call their publications "news" if they have not met the requirements to do so.
(Of course, there's no such thing as an unbiased source. The curated set of facts that end up put together into a news article is itself an editorial choice. But we already have a news media that generates every possible combination of such facts, so that bias, at least, sort of "evens out.")
Which is quite unrealistic unless you're talking about blowing a story about the local bakery or something like that. If any journalist can access the witness, they have no real security. Journalists are not all incorruptible angels, and a whistleblower is already in danger by trusting just one or two.
Witness protection works by essentially making the witness and their immediately family cut off everyone they know and restart their lives with new identities. It's a tremendous cost to pay, and the only reason most do it is because they're also implicated, and want to cut a deal. Who in their right mind would completely ruin their good, law-abiding life just to report some corrupt politician?
There are a spectrum of solutions to creating anonymity. If your source is just a faceless worker who happened to overhear something about their boss, then all they need from you is a burner phone, an email address on a public server, and GPG keys—all of which you can give out the public halves of.
If your source is Edward Snowden, and his information is about the state, then I would suggest that there's really no way to do things other than full-on "witness protection" in the sense Snowden achieved: the state is going to figure out who leaked the information, so even without giving other journalists access to your source, anonymity for them (where they currently live) is no longer possible. You may as well fly them to Russia; at which point they're safe enough that you can just give them the a public email address, tell them to access it from an Internet cafe over Tor, and now they've once again got a contact point that anyone else could interact with them through without "blowing their cover." So why not give it out?
But then how does that prove anything? I can give you an email address and phone number of someone who will tell you anything I want.
I cringe at my own pedantry here but I think it's important to the larger conversation.
All arguments generalize. That isn't just the point of the argument, it is what an argument is - a synthesis and generalization of evidence. That an argument generalizes isn't the problem, how and to what extent the argument does and the implications and chain of evidence for the generalizations is what matters.
What I meant, to be clear, is that the two arguments I was referring to both are of the structure that starts with "people are dumb, and there is an agency that saves them from themselves" but then diverge by assuming different universal properties of organizations, using a concrete example of a good or bad organization and then assuming that those properties would always apply to an organization in such a role.
The SEC and MiniTruth effectively "do the same thing." The SEC is a bit more specialized, but it still does have an information-control/censorship role, saying what news the officers of a public company must always, and must never, publish about said company. So it's interesting, in my mind, to ask what "an SEC doing MiniTruth's job" would look like, and "a MiniTruth doing the SEC's job" would look like, and then to try the two original arguments again with those altered visions as their subjects.
I wish people would think of consequences more. The consequences and logistics of what you're suggesting are horrible. And I think once you have to time to reflect, you'll agree.
EDIT: I should mention I do not necessarily endorse her views with respect to 9/11.
Also, believe it or not, government-funded media already exists. For example, there's Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, the various spokespeople of government agencies like the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Health and Human Services, etc etc.
With that in mind: why should one more new media agency be uniquely offensive?
2) Many of these arguments seem vague and conspiratorial. For example, it asserts that plutocrats really control all of our media. For this, it cites another article by the same author, which talks about Jeff Bezos acquiring Washington Post.
That seems like a pretty big jump to me.
3) Many of these arguments argue things that do not support her point. For example, it claims that the media is pro-establishment. Okay, so what? The establishment has some good qualities.
Imagine the skit from Life of Brian, "What have the Romans ever done for us?" but s/romans/establishment/.
For instance, the work by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent documents how mainstream news consistently reinforces government narratives, even when they are based on lies (Iraq, Vietnam, etc). These organizations you mention are in fact propaganda outlets intended for foreign audiences or literally government agencies, they don't regularly directly criticize US foreign policy on other than a tactical basis.
The Jeff Bezos story is an example of the larger story of media consolidation where the majority of US media is owned by a handful of corporations. How often will such news organizations report conflicts of interest or report critically on their bosses?
The establishment position is bloodthirsty. That's a big point of contention.
Turns out complex societies are used to funnel wealth to the richest at the expense of the poorest. Who would have thought, apart from anyone who has studied them.
[0] The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy, chapters 15 and 16
[1] Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070
This one isn't exactly a secret.
90% of US media is controlled by 5 companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_cross-ownership_in_the_U...
These 15 Billionaires Own America's News Media Companies http://archive.li/hWTJt
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
As a UK citizen, the implication that Britain was involved in poisoning its own citizens is not unlike how many Americans feel about '9/11 was a false flag'.
The mainstream political opinion got us into Iraq, Vietnam, sold arms to the Indonesians in East-Timor, and concocted a nuclear missile gap with Russia that never existed. I don't think it deserves any credence except where concrete evidence is provided (and this goes for everyone else outside the mainstream too).
If one were to ignore political biases, I think they would admit that there was more motive for the rebels to stage a gas attack to create international pressure for a cease-fire that allows them to escape a surrounded and hopeless position, than for Assad to bring the wrath of the world down upon himself to gas a completely surrounded and hopeless enemy. If you don't at least admit that such a thing warrants investigation, you are not being honest.
Were you troubled at how quickly the "political mainstream" came to consensus on what happened there, before any investigation had occurred?
Conveniently 17th century colonial Massachusetts had that too!
> the Puritans were a religious group that drew disproportionately from the most educated and education-obsessed parts of the English populace. Literacy among immigrants to Massachusetts was twice as high as the English average, and in an age when the vast majority of Europeans were farmers most immigrants to Massachusetts were skilled craftsmen or scholars. And the Puritan “homeland” of East Anglia was a an unusually intellectual place, with strong influences from Dutch and Continental trade; historian Havelock Ellis finds that it “accounts for a much larger proportion of literary, scientific, and intellectual achievement than any other part of England.”
> Furthermore, only the best Puritans were allowed to go to Massachusetts; Fischer writes that “it may have been the only English colony that required some of its immigrants to submit letters of recommendation” and that “those who did not fit in were banished to other colonies and sent back to England”. Puritan “headhunters” went back to England to recruit “godly men” and “honest men” who “must not be of the poorer sort”.
From: http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-see...
Puritans were the original high-IQ eugenicists who wanted to go LARP in the woods. And they did.
I think "learning" might be a misleading analogy for how societies evolve... "evolve" is probably also a misleading analogy
I think it's also worth considering the effect that the internet has on the flow of information in society. Our current situation is not the same as it is when the first amendment was written. I'm not saying we should get rid of it and institute a Ministry of Truth, but we shouldn't assume that the people who wrote it were infallible and any differences between today's society and society 300 years ago don't matter.
Now sure, they might have been wrong, and they're weren't infallible, but if you're seeking to overturn that, you probably need something more compelling than 'the internet has increased the flow of information'. It was the increased flow of information with the printing press that brought about the Enlightenment in the first place.
Now to be clear, I'm obviously not advocating human rights violations, and strict governmental control ... I'm only pointing out that things like 'freedom of speech', while awesome and right IMO _may_ not exactly be the root cause of this age of prosperity.
With several eastern European countries trending in an authoritarian direction (and Turkey pretty far along that path already) I am worried about the effect that Chinese prosperity without democratic ideals will have.
You can question the methodology, but then you have to make an argument as to why Norway, New Zealand, Finland, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Denmark, the US and other mature social democracies which routinely top these rankings are not good places to live. Very few citizens of those countries would choose to live in Xi's China instead.
I only have to make the argument that personal freedom is not as important as economic prosperity. Since the end of the Cold War the general thinking was "democratic ideals -> economic prosperity -> good life". China's economic success without embracing democratic ideals to the extent that successful Western countries is making people and governments once again question whether or not the democratic ideals are actually needed.
I would rather live in the US or Europe than China at the moment, but how long will that remain true for most people if China surpasses the US as the world's reigning superpower?
But that's not the relevant question. The relevant question is whether the businesses of those countries would choose to do business from within Xi's China.
China has massively westernized and expanded its freedoms.
Sure, it still had a long way to go, but at least these days the Chinese government isn't arresting professors en mass and forcing them to work on farms.
Yes, this literally happened. It was called the cultural revolution.
As bad as humans rights and freedoms are in China, I think people really underestimate just how much worse they used to be.
There is a still a gulf between China's view of personal freedom and the West's view. It's also reasonable to be concerned that they will be moving away from the West's democratic ideals in the near future, seeing as their President just claimed the power to govern for life.
The question is whether or not they will always be playing catch up, and whether or not that's directly related to the personal freedom of their citizens.
Anyways, I'm not seeking to overturn it. I said specifically in my comment "I'm not saying we should get rid of it".
I just think we should be open to modifying any part of the Constitution. Many people refuse to consider this and think of parts of it as sacred doctrine. The first and second amendments, in particular.
The Constitution is hard to change precisely because it's hard to get widespread consensus on changes to such fundamental precepts of our society. Especially in a country as big and diverse in viewpoints as the U.S.
Given the current level of division in our society, I'm not open to modifying any part of the Constitution right now.
I don't know that people are unwilling to _modify_ it, but rather to _violate_ it. I honestly personally would be pretty happy with no 2A, but unless the specific majorities required for an amendment agree with me, I'm strongly against violating it ad-hoc. The rule of law is simply a lot more important than any given policy.
But we already are and have been for a very long time (the 2A has no limitation as tintypes of arms), and, more importantly, we’re violating the premise it rests on regarding reliance on the citizen militia without which it makes no sense (and we've been doing that for longer.)
I fully agree that the amendment process has to be used. I would be in favor of a 28th amendment placing well thought out limitations on the 1st or the 2nd amendments. Assuming I thought that the limitations it was placing on them were good limitations.
The difference is between broad consensus and divided opinion. A Constitutional amendment requires a 2/3 vote of Congress to propose, and ratification by 3/4 of states (which means any Constitutional amendment would require support from both red and blue states). Ordinary legislation only requires a 50% + 1 majority.
That's not really true of any non-budgetary legislation (for now).
Where that's approximately true, it's actually 50% + ½.
In the Senate, though, in practice, due to cloture, it potentially takes a 3/5 supermajority for most regular legislation.
Yea,that's like... The entire point of the constitution. This is like saying "what's the difference between changing a law or breaking and entering after asking your friend Jeb if it's ok".
Have we? Take a look at the state of the press in Sweden. It's not much different from China these days. Without freedom of speech, there is no freedom of the press. America is the only country that guarantees either. Although, I will concede that our press isn't much better these days. There's a very real problem when every media outlet in the country is owned by just five companies.
Could you elaborate on that? I guess most people here have no idea of what's the problem there.
Many people think that such a thing is not possible, or that the giving the Government such a power would be too much.
I personally think I could be persuaded to give such a power to the judiciary branch. I'd have to think about it a lot more before coming to a final decision, though.
Truth is a slippery concept - and i would far rather - like you- we did not have a department deciding upfront what is or is not truth.
plus this idea might have the pleasing side effect of ministerial pronouncements being testable in court - although this is politics. Johnson's "350 million a week" bus was denounced as untrue from many quarters - but it was still a winning slogan - so perhaps the problem is still not fake news, but what people want to believe and why.
However, I am honestly not sure if it's just American first amendment indoctrination that makes me think that is significantly different than deciding what is true and what isn't.
That's literally what determining facts means.
> They decide whether the evidence presented to them is sufficient to show that an event or events happened
Yes, they determine the facts—what is true and not—by weighing the evidence.
> My understanding is that even in defamation suits they are mostly trying to prove that person A said thing X about person C and then prove that person C was harmed because of it.
They also decide whether X is true, and, if so, whether Person A claimed it with knoweldge of it's falsity or reckless disregard of the truth. But the other determinations are also decisions about what is true.
And in almost any case, the jury is tasked with determining the credibility of witnesses.
In a legal sense, that's exactly what they do. Juries are, by definition, deciders of fact, i.e. they decided what is legally true based on the evidence presented to them.
Whether legal "truth," epistemological "truth," and physical "truth" coincide is an entirely separate (and largely pointless) issue.
Seriously though, libel and slander cases in the US are ridiculously hard to prove because you have to prove intent.
If you are going to address this, it seems to me to almost require a pre-emptive rather than a reactive approach.
This is a fantasy in good company with, "free markets will always sort everything out fairly", "we don't need governments or regulations, just property rights", "unrestricted gun ownership will make everyone safer", and "the solution to clickbait is for people to just start reading the articles."
It depends on everyone suddenly becoming some kind of imagined ideal, just so that the world doesn't have to be so fuzzy and messy and can be reduced to simplistic mantras that any child can memorize.
> It may help to read about twentieth century dictatorships and the history of modern, repressive regimes in general.
It may also help to realize that the early 21st century has some issues that the early 20th century didn't. The power of business interests has now risen to compete on an equal footing with the largest governments, and in many cases is subverting or corrupting it. With so many people now being plugged in to some form of media or another, and so much of that media being controlled by a small number of powerful oligopolies, people are being influenced in ways that Hearst never could've imagined.
I'm ambivalent about legislating media, but there are a few incontrovertible facts IMO: this is a new problem for society, it's a serious problem, and people aren't going to magically become resilient to it overnight.
I think the people who are aghast at Trump sitting in the White House have already got some sense of the scope of this problem. For the people who are happy to see him there, I'd point out that a lot of leftists seriously floated the idea of Oprah running for president, and that only stopped because she wasn't interested. Imagine the amount of political influence she would have had through the media she controls, though.
As is so often the case, probably all that's needed to get right-leaning people on board with tightening regulations on media is for the left to find their Trump.
As long as people have many options the concerns are mostly theoretical, but still valid.
If it's a choice between the BBC and the constant, blatant, society distorting lies you see in American "News", I'll take my Orwellian dystopia thanks.
You can see plenty examples of this at Wings Over Scotland (which I know is biased, but is also scrupulously accurate)
There's no mention here of the regulation only applying during elections - where are you getting that from?
--
Can you link me to some of the lies from the BBC during the indyref?
The classic example of BBC lies would be Nick Robinson of course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_XhTALHQzI
If you want a more recent example of BBC bias, try: https://wingsoverscotland.com/the-bad-losers/
Edit: this compromise, to my mind, would not involve the government approving stories, but perhaps restricting internet connectivity to and from those hostile nations.
In fact the nazis did just like the fox and the trump crowd today and labeled all mainstream news fake.
I don’t think you can dismiss the danger of such news environment. It plunged Germany into dictatorship. A too liberal democracy is vulnurable to totalitarians. We saw this in Egypt when anti-democratic muslim brotherhood gained power through elections.
When people say that (insert liberty here) is what leads to Nazism, you're not making that liberty seem more dangerous. You're making Nazism seem less bad.
>A too liberal democracy is vulnurable to totalitarians. We saw this in Egypt when anti-democratic muslim brotherhood gained power through elections.
At no point in history has Egypt ever been accurately referred to as "a too liberal democracy". Hardline conservative/fundamentalist religious thought is a bigger source of the mess in Egypt than people having freedom.
I would define "fake news" as news published by people who know what they're publishing is false. My feeling is that either there were more of those kinds of articles floating around this past election or they were more visible.
You might just call it clickbait, but "fake news" didn't seem like an inapt descriptor until it started being applied to everything someone disagrees with.
or that Hillary Clinton only won 57 counties in the 2016 election https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-won-3084-of-3141-cou...
However, the fact stands that there are also a lot more cases of wildly different interpretations of the same fact. We can look at poverty rates or crime rates and draw very different conclusions about the causes or solutions to those problems based on the same information.
Go look at donald trump's twitter feed. It's full of outright incorrect statements being presented as fact.
Funny seeing such a local and current political tribe-based perspective in a discussion on the history of fake news.
As if they just happened to be witness to the spawning of some new phenomenon which also happens to be caused by their pet political opponents. Meanwhile in reality it's really been one of the oldest products of human-fallible mass media consumption (see: low investment content targeting emotion driven responses) used by every political ideology who happens to have influence over particular media sources.
That may have been your introduction, of a popular/easy punching-bag demographic pushing their own politically convenient narrative. But this particular story hardly extends beyond a niche of extremists (or at most a sizeable group of hopelessly low-education voters) on Reddit/Twitter. Notably these days including a large percentage of trolls who know better but will happily push it because they enjoy getting reactions.
I find it interesting to see how this type of misrepresentation and FUD is spawned by otherwise smart people. Beyond simply being young and naive by thinking everything you recently discovered is a new phenomenon. And ultimately I believe it has to do with their exposure to media within their small bubble of content sources, followed by a mass extrapolation to the wider public who identify with their adversarial political party. So they legitimately think it's an important problem and feature of x group, instead of almost every group a) by dumb subset after certain scale or b) the ideas of an entirely fringe group. But usually it's just a vocal minority of a niche forum gets applied to the wider public.
If outrage and reactionary politics was scaled to the actual influence and power of the groups they see as a threat the world would be a far more boring and stable place. But that doesn't sell Buzzfeed pageviews, or any newspaper commercially incentivized exaggerated narratives, nor does it translate well to 2-3 sentence long comments on social media sites.
Pandering, oversimplification, and snarky soundbites is what sells on reddit. It's the perfect platform for overblown FUD to spread. Which is iornic given how Redditors love to attack TV shows, targeting the emotions of the lowest common denominators, for doing the same.
Moving away from extreme cases, things are still wrong enough to cause trouble. False information is inherently surprising when presented as true, because it isn't expected. It follows that false information lends itself better to clickbait titles. This in turn leads to false information having better click through and sharing metrics. Sharing metrics and engagement metrics are used to power recommendation systems. So it follows that recommendation systems are biased toward recommending false information. Compounding the issue, content producers know this. They optimize their content for an environment which promotes false information, which biases content in a way that generates the sort of speculative conclusions you mention. As a natural consequence of the flawed environment, this flawed content is then seen by a greater number of people.
That out news system isn't as good as would like is just true. I still remember the TED talk when I found out about how much better the world was doing by most metrics. All those educated and rich people who could afford to attend a TED talk and yet the majority had no idea as to the true state of the world. If the news wasn't biased such that it presents a false narrative, then why such glaring ignorance among the educated?
Me = not an expert on elections
Yet, at almost every turn along the path of the 2016 election, I was far more accurate than Nate Silver.
Is Nate Silver's expert opinion still more valuable than mine? Is expert opinion valuable even if it is right no more often than coin flipping?
Nate Silver is a statistical analysis expert, not particularly an election expert.
> Yet, at almost every turn along the path of the 2016 election, I was far more accurate than Nate Silver.
Really, for all the elections that year? What about 2008, 2010, 2012, and 2014?
> Is Nate Silver's expert opinion still more valuable than mine?
Where can we see your historical set of outcome predictions to validate their superiority?
> Is expert opinion valuable even if it is right no more often than coin flipping?
Nate Silver has been right more often than coin flipping.
In math, if you only write the correct answer, you'll get a zero for not showing your work. In debate and discussions, there can zero, one, or more than one correct solution to a topic, and "showing your work" is often more valuable than having an answer, and answers can be right or wrong explicitly depending on your work.
You got lucky. If you can consistently beat his methodology then you'd be just as famous and wealthy and well regarded as he is instead of an internet nobody.
This is like saying "college is for the birds, I just plan to win the lottery."
>Is Nate Silver's expert opinion still more valuable than mine?
Absolutely. Missing the boat on what turned out to be something of a freak-show election where 77,000 votes out of than 136 million ballots cast is tough for anyone to get right. And most of who, did so by dumb luck, not some wonderful new methodology that is useful against past election data or current election data. The very same people beating their chests over Trump's win predicted Moore would win Alabama or Saccone would beat Lamb.
In other words its just dumb partisanship, not some new polling or statistical technique at work here. Patting yourself on the back because you 'called it' for Trump is a meaningless statement unless you have the math to prove your methods are better than Nate Silvers.
Silver didn't call a close election, though. That would have been impressive. All he said was that it would be closer than a landslide.
Silver predicted a fairly high probability of a very close election, including a 10.8% chance Clinton would win the popular vote and lose the electoral vote.
> All he said was that it would be closer than a landslide.
No, Silver's model provided a lot more detail than that.
Most coins are 50/50, not 75/25.
Also, the answer entirely depends upon whether there's anyone out there who can do better than 50/50.
That was, in fact a fake news story. The fact it asserted had no basis in reality.
The political angle it has taken is unfortunate -- due to the prominence of "fake news" in the last US election; the net effect has been a devolution of the word into a snarl word for "I don't like your particular political point of view". IMHO what you are describing -- a news organization has a bias or opinion (strong or not), but still tries to maintain some degree of connection with factual data -- is not fake news.
And now the term has been hijacked to mean any new you disagree with.
Weekly World News is fictional satire about aliens.
I do sometimes wonder if there's room for a special class of formal speech for journalism. Grant rights perhaps formalizing protecting a source. But also require some responsibilities. Not sure what the standard should be, but we do the same thing for lawyers and doctors.
Also "pernicious to the publick weal" is an amusing phrase.
This wall has been eroded, with some of the most striking erosion happening around the threatened prosecution of James Risen for refusing to disclose a source.
https://theintercept.com/2018/01/03/my-life-as-a-new-york-ti...
In 17th century Massachusetts the just arbiters of truth, naturally being the Massachusetts Government, would soon fall to frenzied lust in pursuit and prosecution of 'witches' for which they tried, convicted, and executed numerous individuals. The same body behind this is the one that was also responsible for judging what was true and what was false and doling out punishment accordingly...
[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
I think maybe, we have just woken up to what is going on.
People weren't looking for something to blame his winning on. That's a loaded statement. They were looking for reasons that he won. That's a reasonable thing to do. We've never had a President like him. Our polling methods in the 2016 election didn't predict him winning. Obviously people missed something that was a factor in this election and fake news is one of the things they looked into.
Had Trump not butchered the term I doubt we would still be talking about it much in the public forum.
The Google trends map in the comment I replied to shows the original peak in Novermber of 2016 which I think started when Buzzfeed ran an article about fake news stories having more engagement on Facebook than true news stories leading up to the election. [1]
There's another peak in early December that is probably from Hillary mentioning it in a speech. [2]
There's a third peak in January which is probably from when Trump wouldn't let Jim Acosta ask a question and called him and CNN fake news. [3]
After that, it was officially added into Trumpian vernacular. Had he not started using the term incorrectly on a regular basis, we would not have seen the continued popularity of the word that the graph shows after December 2016. There would have been some peaks due to various academic studies about actual fake news coming out and being reported on but most of the popularity and staying power comes from Trump.
[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/01/03/ho...
[3] http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/01/11/donald-trump-press-con...
Social scapegoating as an American institution.
The "genocide" of native Americans was a result of European diseases, not barbarism.[1] As the people had no idea of germ theory, it is impossible to claim this was intentional.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...
'Instead, when the Indians were ready to leave, Trent wrote: "Out of our regard for them, we gave them two Blankets and an Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect."' -- http://www.history.org/foundation/journal/spring04/warfare.c...
More commonly rumored to be used by British against Americans, though.
More importantly, the argument that American settlers and later government policies deliberately exterminated large populations of natives does not even remotely rest on this. Are you really conflating them? Are you that ignorant of the history?
You also don't seem to understand the concept of genocide, the whole point of which is that it's extra bad to kill off a population as it gets smaller.
What a disgusting excuse for a thought process. What is it do you think that's wrong with you that gives you such a deep need to ensure that your ancestors were morally pure?
We should bring that back. Get triggered demand a duel :)
Enough PC
[BURR]
Can we agree that duels are dumb and immature?
[HAMILTON]
Sure
But your man has to answer for his words, Burr
[BURR]
With his life? We both know that’s absurd, sir
[HAMILTON]
Hang on, how many men died because Lee was inexperienced and ruinous?
[BURR]
Okay, so we’re doin’ thisTo force it on society is to remove freedom from society.
That is not a choice. That is a consequence and it has consequences.
Treating people with respect without expecting anything in return gets you far.