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Comment by paradite | Hacker News Reader

In 2016, before the US election, I posted this comment on problem of rumours in China and the thread turned pretty nasty: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11405320

Now with the revelation of fake news and dis-information, Western countries are scrambling to tackle this problem through fact checking. But who is the authoritative source?

The west seems to believe that government should be the last candidate, but maybe China can prove it wrong and demonstrate having trust between citizens and their government.

Edit: I just want to have a discussion on the trust relationship between citizens and the government, but if people feel this is going into an ideological battle, feel free to flag this comment.

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The government has far too much vested interest to be trustworthy.

What is required is a re-assertion of reputation.

People have become far too willing to believe facebook posts, etc, and even respectable media has become far too willing to echo them.

Reputable media sources need to re-assert their credentials, or even individual bloggers etc, need to step up to stand behind their posts.

With a cadre of trustworthy sources, individuals can then take steps to exclude internet chum.

>The government has far too much vested interest to be trustworthy.

So does everyone else.

That's the Great Aporia here.

How do we establish credibility in an environment that is 100% free of trust?

I don't think that "so does everyone else" really covers it.

Some people are logically more trustworthy than others. People who are not under pressure to push a particular narrative, for example.

Say, tenured university faculty. Educated people who's livelihood does not depend on saying the right thing. They get a high trustworthiness rating, right?

>tenured university faculty. Educated people who's livelihood does not depend on saying the right thing. They get a high trustworthiness rating, right?

No. They are just as biased and have just as selfish an agenda as anyone else. Consider this, all of the scientific papers out there that we are finding to be erroneous lately had been "peer reviewed". Well, guess who those "peers" were?

We all have biases and agendas that leave us open to potentially compromising our integrity. Please don't misunderstand me, I'm not claiming to know how we should go about establishing authority in an environment devoid of trust. I'm just saying that I don't think it would be wise to simply assign automatic credibility to the government, or tenured academics, or police, or the clergy, or whatever else.

It depends on what subject area. Tenured or not, folk who depend for their salaries, pensions and grants on funds provided by the taxpayer might perhaps, understandably, be much in favor of big government and state, generally supported by the Left. Not many right wing academics around.

Doesn't really even have anything to do with "left" or "right". In reality "left" and "right" only serve to provide a convenient categorization method for sorting the groups and people that will tend to agree with a particular ideology. But all of those groups and people are not to be trusted, because they all have biases and agendas that lead to compromised integrity.

(In the case of people and groups on the "left" or the "right", the bias and agenda is clear. They are compromising in support of their ideologies.)

I do agree with this sentiment. When I saw pewdiepie jokingly claim his YouTube news program to be "the most trustworthy news source", I actually want to agree with it seriously.

> The government has far too much vested interest to be trustworthy.

Yet they are the only entity that can make laws against it

"But who is the authoritative source?" The enlightenment tells us that Reason is the authoritative source!

You dont need discussion, you need a clearer picture of enlightenment values. You can start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6qYjisp51M

Without the correct facts, you can easily convince yourself of something which is absolutely wrong.

The enlightenment dictates that the world is discoverable through reason Not authority. This lesson was even learnt in the sciences.

http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Kelvin.html

There are borderline content that’s hard to judge, but also tons of content that’s undoubtedly fake. For years there have been tons of articles floating around WeChat (Chinese social network) that’s completely made up stories and yet causing bad influence. As an example, there was a very popular article claiming seaweeds sold on the market are often made of plastics. Eventually the author of was identified and basically said that was what he felt like, but the impact of this article was real.

The government is in the best position to stop this by establishing laws against creating and spreading such misinformation.

Why do people trust a random article over some statement issued by the government?

If a government is trustworthy then you need no laws to prevent disinformation. If its not trustworthy then the last thing you want is laws that allow them to clamp down on information.

The traditional western concept is that an educated people will be able to discern who to trust and when ...

This is also why western societies are democratic.

> The traditional western concept is that an educated people will be able to discern who to trust and when ...

That won't solve the immediate problem of caused by fake articles circling around; and it will just bias towards hurting less educated people (who, btw, are exactly the target of those articles)

If there are laws against false information, of course this would need to go through proper law enforcement process, e.g. There must be proof that the articles are made up with intentional lies and the person should go through a trial.

The western societies never solve this problem and there's nothing to be proud about.

I would agree that western societies never solved this problem directly however they did try an indirect approach. Universal education slowly grew till a peak at around the 80s. They tried to arm the average person with Reason as well as practical skills like general literacy and exposure science. You combine that with low corruption and a general trust in authority and you have a very functional society.

But again in all seriousness why would the public believe a random article over any statement by government or other authoritative body?

Let me answer that with first hand experience.

The bulk of rumours in China that is causing issues are the ones that claim some kind of emergency (impending landslide, new virus in certain type of meat). They prey on the "宁可信其有，不可信其无＂mindset, which means "better to believe in something than not believing and suffer as a consequence". Like people will not eat chicken if there's a rumour about chicken being infected, because they will be guaranteed safe if they believe the rumour and don't eat it. That's just how average Chinese citizen thinks. Older generations don't bother to do fact checking.

On top of that, the rumours sometimes claim to be from an official source. Like it will start with "Latest news from the CCP", or "Breaking news from CCTV (national TV channel)". And people trust those sources so they are more likely to believe the rumour without verifying if the source is fake or genuine.

Bottom line is, Chinese people in general have higher degree of trust in government as compared to west. But they are less informed and easier to be tricked by rumours (more gullible), especially people with lower level of education.

People won’t usually believe random articles over statement from government or other authorities body. But most often, the articles never gets debunked since there are so many, and even if they are, it could be too late to repair the damage already done - business getting hurt etc., and the authorities statement may not reach everyone that believed the fake stories.

If there are no laws and there are no consequences making up such stories, nothing can really stop this.

The most likely truth is one which is sourced from multiple, non-associated entities, or ones which don't have incentive to co-operate. This would rule out the government model because they are a single source and they have a vested interest in pushing a single "truth", not to say that they're always wrong.

Much like wikipedia, if you source from a diverse enough base of information and providers, you are more likely to land on the truth than not.

I don't think Wikipedia is a good example. It has suffered from vandalism and edit wars (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_warring). It will only get worse when more people rely on it and more people have incentives to vandalize it.

Also, it is not a source of truth, it is merely an aggregation service. So it doesn't effectively solve the problem where two sources claim the opposite and the reader doesn't know who to trust.

Yes, but most of the time you will have more than two sources.

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