Google and Facebook should be regulated for news content, UK government report
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
http://healthfeedback.org/the-most-popular-health-articles-o...
Many articles from otherwise reputable sources are not credible, or accurate or are simply false. Journalists no longer do any fact checking. Sensationalism is more important than reputation.
So on to the idea that Google and Facebook should be regulated, I think it's an absolutely horrible idea. We are talking of censorship conducted by the government, the worst kind there is. And thinking of our own government, I can't think of people that are more corrupt or incompetent.
Just fucking educate people on fact checking and elementary logic. Push for some lessons in high-school or whatever.
Agreed, this is long overdue and the only sustainable solution that isn’t just tyranny in waiting. The problem is that teaching critical thinking to kids makes them less prone to bing manipulated, and governments want people they can push and pull, as do advertisers, and so do a lot of parents even if they don’t realize it. When little Billy comes home and starts questioning his devout parents about inconsistencies in their religion, that’s enough for Billy’s parents to be against it. It’s not a hard thing to imagine either, just look at anti-evolution campaigning.
I would guess that a majority of parents want kids that believe what they’re told by the parents regardless of merit. So it’s pushback from all sides, because so many people are strongly invested in manipulating each other. Critical thinking is like a broad spectrum antibiotic, insofar as you don’t really pick and choose what it acts against. From your and my perspective that’s the feature, but to a lot of people it’s the bug.
(Also, come back when the teachers are paid appropriately.)
Why the censorship is done by a corporation is so much better than the one done by an elected government? I think that censorship is the wrong thing not who does it.
> So on to the idea that Google and Facebook should be regulated, I think it's an absolutely horrible idea.
For what it seems the USA election was deeply impacted by a foreign hostile government using Facebook ads. There are countries where sectarian violence is on the rise thanks to how Facebook prioritises stories for engagement.
Facebook or Google need to be regulated because they are radicalizing people in search of more engagement to sell more ads. That is not a good situation, and there is no incentive for them to stop doing it. As it is the best way to get more money.
Should these companies be allowed to run what accounts as psychological experiments on big portions of the population without any supervision? For me, the answer is no. It is unethical and it will impact negatively the people affected.
> Just fucking educate people on fact checking and elementary logic.
This supposes that the fault is in the individuals not in the system. And that it is easier to change all the population than to regulate a handful of companies. I am all for better education, but to solve the problem with the big tech companies regulation is needed.
I would still request evidence about the scope of this, because basic evidence suggests strongly that the influence was minuscule.
So I would heavily question "deeply impacted". Perhaps this whole story was just fake news?
I would even be satisfied with any ad from any country having the ability to significantly sway any election.
There are far more probable explanations for the result of the election.
Hillary didn't take any non-screened questions from the press for a period of several months during the heat of the campaign.
HRC campaign was overconfident in swing states and chose not to campaign there.
If advertising can win elections, then Hillary would have won since she far outspent Trump on media. Let's not forget she had a much larger army of astro turfers (Correct The Record) pushing her message on the internet and it was all for moot. It turns out people aren't as easy to sway as advertisers would have you believe.
Because a company can censor whatever they want, and you don't have to use Facebook if you don't want to. With the government, there is an inherent threat of violence if you don't comply. Very simple.
That must be a nice fantasy land you're living in.
If the public square has become the internet, it behooves the government to regulate it for political speech in the same way they do sex,race,religion, .etc.
Speaking as a child of communism, the difference is that in case the government is doing the censorship you're no longer free to build your own platform, you're no longer free to have your own voice.
In one case it's a matter of freedom, in another it's just a matter of cost. The difference is night and day.
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> "For what it seems the USA election was deeply impacted by a foreign hostile government using Facebook ads. There are countries where sectarian violence is on the rise thanks to how Facebook prioritises stories for engagement."
Introducing censorship won't help fix these issues and there's absolutely no evidence that regulation helps in increasing the quality of news. Worse, government mandated censorship is pretty much irreversible without a revolution.
This notion that people need protection from external influence has been the explanation for the censorship happening behind the Iron Curtain. It's the logic used by dictators and oligarchies.
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> "Should these companies be allowed to run what accounts as psychological experiments on big portions of the population without any supervision? For me, the answer is no. It is unethical and it will impact negatively the people affected."
You still have the freedom to delete your Facebook account and note that I totally agree about privacy protections. I love the GDPR, but don't push censorship on me just because you are unable to distinguish fact from fiction.
Also don't lump privacy together with fake news, in order to appeal to emotions, because they are not the same thing. Why don't you throw a "think of the children" in there too.
Regulation does not equate censorship. There are other things that can be done. What do you think about this one "The report also said social media companies should agree to "code of conduct" to govern their commercial agreements with publishers."?
It looks like a good idea that the tech giants should be held accountable for how they run their advertisement business that affects the behaviour of all the population.
"Should these companies be allowed to run what accounts as psychological experiments on big portions of the population without any supervision?" is a valid question. It is not censorship. What do you think about it?
Also "child of communism" is a combination appeal to emotion with an appeal to authority thrown in for good measure. It's an attempt to paper over a breathless strawman argument - so, triple threat, I guess.
I have massive issues with UK politics but knowing a few civil servants, they're not (widely) corrupt, and they're not incompetent.
In any department, they will normally be the force for good policy based on evidence, it's politicians who push random expedient ideas. Take grammar schools, the entire department of education knows they don't work and are being forced to push it. Or Brexit, the whole civil service pretty much opposes it, and especially the treasury/trade people in detailed knowledge that it's going to be an economic tire fire.
Finally, regulation != censorship, there's such a thing as a middle ground.
If the companies don't like this they can either spin off their news related products into a separate company or stop actively trying to control the news narrative.
This is simple.
I was taught this back in the 90s, UK GSCE History so a mandatory class at least for the first 3 years. I can't quite remember if it came later or earlier, but early would make sense.
Consider the source, bias, first hand account / second / here say etc., find and compare multiple sources.
Maybe this isn't common and I was lucky? Maybe it doesn't happen these days. My history teacher was brilliant, one of the few I remember fondly.
I would blame Google and Facebook for this though. G crafted the online marketing landscape to favor using their ads (since most brands use adwords the most), and Facebook's post model favors clickbait headlines so that users click them and continue to use FB.
Thankfully these news publications have figured out they can start charging a monthly fee, like it was before the internet, but I fear this will push out small players that don't get as many subscribers as the new york times.
EDIT: I don't know what I'm talking about with age ranges. I was 13 years old when I went to high school in 1989; my daughter turned 13 today and is in 7th grade.
No government is interested in educating their own people on fact checking and logic because a truly educated population is hard to control. All governments want their population fat, dumb and brainwashed.
Also, we are constantly told the lie that news companies hold power to account. But what's interesting is that every major news company was created by the government, banker, politician, etc. So power created these news companies to keep themselves to account? If Trump created "Trump news", would anyone believe he created it to keep himself in check?
Name any "credible" major news company. They were all founded by either a government, banker, politician, etc. Power created these companies to constrain power? I find that hard to believe and it's historically false.
“By giving students the proper tools to analyze the media they consume, we can empower them to make informed decisions...”
https://sd03.senate.ca.gov/news/20180917-governor-brown-sign...
> On or before July 1, 2019, the department shall make available to school districts on its Internet Web site a list of resources and instructional materials on media literacy, including media literacy professional development programs for teachers.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
It's funny how if alabama ran a state media indoctrination campaign, some people would be screaming propaganda. But california does it, some people think it is a good thing.
These kids should be thought logic and history of media. Not "how to analyze media". Teaching them logic and history helps them to analyze everything ( religion, media, science, literature, etc ). Not just "media".
What would be your opinion of china or russia running a media "literacy" campaign on their own children?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/08/wikipedia... / http://www.adnews.com.au/news/microsoft-flags-daily-mail-uk-...
There was a big push to regulate the UK media's endemic lack of ethics after the phone hacking scandal, but apart from collapsing "News of the World" no real change was achieved.
(On the other hand, the Hutton Inquiry censured the BBC for reporting that turned out to be accurate, so ...)
Might as well point out that the newscasters from the Marvel cinematic universe are also fake news.
So - much as I have limited respect for Facebook etc, the idea that the Internet should be regulated while the sewer press is allowed to run riot is just a little bit of a reach.
I think society in general is nearly at the point of basically declaring bankruptcy on trustworthiness of journalism and are treating everything as having an agenda. But then how can you fund news with an agenda from public funds?
>the government
There is no 'the government'.
The government is an entity of elected and unelected people. They have their own bias, their own friends, their own wants.
I have stopped using Facebook because it sucks, but if the government sucks, I am forced to use them.
Yes, people will invariably point to some instances of the BBC receiving flak for errors in judgement (edit: see below for examples). But if we collectively can no longer agree that there is a difference between the BBC and, say, infowars, then we have lost anyway, and all that’s left is to gleefully watch civilization circling the drain.
My personal opinion is that the BBC's political coverage was thoroughly kneecapped after the Hutton Inquiry ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutton_Inquiry ) at which point they decided to surrender to the government line rather than fight suspected falsehoods.
I guess it is doing something right!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC#21st_cent...
I think the simultaneous accusations of both left and right bias are because separate parts of the Corporation are biased in this way. If you sum those biases then yes maybe it sums to zero, but I'd rather the individual parts were not biased at all.
Politics is about rhetoric, persuasion, spin and - if you can get away with it - outright lies, smears, and distortions.
Claiming that reporting is biased, when in fact it's merely objective but unfavourable, is an absolutely standard weapon in the arsenal of spin.
The only way to attempt to enforce a lack of bias would be to have independent editorial oversight - much like the journalistic equivalent of an independent judiciary.
The Board of Trustees used to attempt that, but the financial reality is that the BBC gets most of its funding from the government, and so is always vulnerable to financial pressures.
IMO lack of access to "clean" unspun fact-based reporting is probably the number one political problem of the moment. Knowingly lying to the public or attempting to influence opinion for personal/political gain should be as much of a crime as dumping asbestos in a school yard.
But currently the political system relies on dishonesty to operate. It's essentially built on denying facts and replacing them with expedient lies, emotional manipulations, and fake "explanations" of why things are the way they are.
So you can't solve one problem without solving the other. And that's a huge, huge challenge.
BBC4 documentaries and things like Arena remain amazing, so they can do quality if they want to and it's not overwhelmingly a cost matter. It's more like populism vs Reithianism, and if the BBC isn't Reithian it will end up not existing.
It's Tory through and through, and apparently unapologetically so.
See also:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourbeeb/tim-holmes/is-question...
That's just one example from a list that is becoming worryingly long now.
Apparently there were "no costs" associated with this, which is even harder to understand. https://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/written-ques...
Would probably make a good test case for anyone's "fake news" detectors.
As for the second article, how to spend your extra £1,000, yes, that one is atrocious.
I agree the BBC is more trustworthy than other sources. But if we're talking legislation how do we write a rule for that? Do we literally legislate 'the BBC, the Telegraph, ... are trustworthy'? Or do we write a qualitative test? But then what is the test? As I said the best idea at the moment seems to be literally 'you know it when you see it'. Which doesn't work.
The tech community has this idea that it’s impossible to make laws affecting such concepts that cannot easily be expressed as an algorithm giving boolean answers. But in reality, that’s exactly what jurisprudence does for a living. Otherwise there would be no need for lawyers and judges and juries.
The “I know it when I see it” quote is, obviously, one coined by a judge, and a supreme one at that. It became famous for both being somewhat true, and for leaving us wanting for something better. And even though the definition of pornography has somewhat advanced since then, and become somewhat less relevant, there still is a gray area: some gangbang on pornhub is probably porn. A bag of Doritos is not porn. In between are the image of Kim Phuc, Michelangelo’s David, and many a work of art. But the existence of that gray area does not negate the possibility to definitively say that the bag of Doritos is not porn, as far as the law is concerned.
A teenage couple tried as adults for child pornography because they sent each other naked pictures of themselves. That is clearly not what the law intended, but the state went after them for it anyways.
Vague/overly-broad laws can be abused. Any law that can be abused will be abused.
(Anyone remember the weird incident where MI5 insisted on the secure destruction of a Guardian laptop?)
What we need to do is eliminate the incentive to build these influence networks - and the primary incentive is that politicians, companies etc... want to pay to push some kind of agenda.
When Medical got regulated in the U.S. the prices skyrocketed, and customer care stagnated. The regulators were incentivized to create a monopoly by the entrenched medical professionals.
Now people are asking for more regulations. Is that the solution?
For example: Legitimate news are members of the Independent Press Standards Organisation, or have a licence to broadcast from Ofcom, or something similar. Media on social platforms will be subject to the same standards as those broadcast on television, or written in print. If videos online are 'fake news' then ofcom deal with that the same as they would on television, or ISPO the same as they would in print.
For foreign news, they could rely on similar organisations in host countries, or an affiliation with a member.
In that regulation, Facebook & Google would agree to revoke the account of the outlet in line with the regulatory organisations guidelines.
Any news outlet that is not a member of the independent organisation, or a licencee of Ofcom is considered fake news.
In my internal "how reliable is this source", that's pretty much the first check I do in my head.
Seems like this is a half-baked, populist attempt to looking like they're doing _something_, when in reality the UK has demonstrated that it has insufficient political spine to stand up to big media.
I guess it's just easier to lash-out at tech companies than it is to address the elephant in the room.
CNBC's version is an example of what some people call "Fake News"
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Fantastic tales with no corroboration. Many of the people producing it knew exactly what they were doing. We're talking about stuff like the first lady being trans, or dispensaries taking food stamps. There's also grey area people, like Alex Jones, where it's not clear how much of his stuff he truly believes.
We don't live in a great time for the press. We just elected someone famous for pushing fake news (Obama's birth certificate). Unfortunately, Trump has been quite adept at changing the meaning of these things. Now people seem to think fake news is just "bad news".