I think censoring the "fake news" is far more dangerous than to just let it exist and have people think for themselves about what's true or false.
And be aware that nations that censor aren't flagging a meme or two. They conspicuously hound reputable outlets and reporters into silence. And everyone living in such places knows it's happening.
They're not wringing thier hands wondering if holocaust denial is not ranked high enough by google, they talking worriedly about Maria Ressa being suddenly jailed etc.
Here is the UK culture minister today writing about the need to control the internet because of "disinformation"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/02/17/era-self-reg...
But he admits that there is no evidence any foreign power has tried to target the UK via disinformation in any way.
And there is no real evidence that's been happening in the USA either. Those claims always fall apart when studied.
"the Government stated that, following the nerve agent attack in Salisbury in March 2018, the Government had “judged the Russian state promulgated at least 38 false disinformation narratives around this criminal act”.267 However, the Government made it clear that “it has not seen evidence of successful use of disinformation by foreign actors, including Russia, to influence UK democratic processes”.2
What is disputed is whether and how "successful" it was, which is almost impossible to ever be certain about.
If you can accept only really verifiably sourced news, things become really inconvenient for both journalists and political opposition.
And where do you put the bar? No interpretation allowed dry facts? Court rulings?
Example from the last US presidential election:
* The Pope endorses Bernie Sanders -> this is fake news
* The Pope endorses Trump -> this is fake news
* The Pope endorses Clinton -> this is fake news
All three spread on facebook, btw (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pope-francis-shocks-world-...)
Also, anonymous sources are not fake news, they're anonymous sources. If labelled as such, the are fine.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/unfounded-claim-tu...
Just like we had all of Greece, and all of Poland then, where there's naught but a wilderness now.
'Leaving the European Union would tip the UK into a year-long recession, with up to 820,000 jobs lost within two years, Chancellor George Osborne says.
Publishing Treasury analysis, he said a Leave vote would cause an "immediate and profound" economic shock, with growth between 3% and 6% lower.'
Edit: Honda Swindon is the latest, just now.
No mention of 'when we leave', is there?
Also if you have a special hotline to Honda management please enlighten us further, because as far as I'm aware nothing has been shared at this time pointing to it being caused by Brexit. Also there are significant global trends affecting the car industry that have nothing to do with Brexit. Please don't be disingenuous.
Did you even read your own post?
> 'Leaving the European Union would tip the UK into a year-long recession, with up to 820,000 jobs lost within two years, Chancellor George Osborne says.
Leaving is not voting to leave. UK hasn't left yet. Note that I think that the statement is wrong, but it certainly hasn't been disproven yet.
A sibling post has already highlighted one of the most notorious examples (voting Leave will trigger an immediate and huge recession), which was promoted as totally the consensus and nobody intelligent could possibly disagree with this guaranteed-to-happen-by-experts prediction. But there were many others (£4300 worse off in 15 years or whatever it was). Did the government really believe these predictions? We can't really know if they were intentionally manipulative or earnestly believed.
The Turkey case is maybe a bit like that. How likely it is to happen depends a lot on your beliefs about what future EU leadership will do. Recall that Turkey joining has been official policy in the not too distant past. Recall also that the people who ultimately control the EU - men like Juncker - routinely say in public that all borders are bad and that the future of Europe is vast quantities of Islamic immigration, that there is a moral imperative to let that happen in fact. And Turkey is a huge and Islamic country on the border of the EU that wants to join the EU. You don't have to be particularly weird or paranoid to assume that whatever objections may currently exist might go away in future.
Or you could say it's evil and manipulative and fake news. Depends entirely on your perspective.
There's one difference - the economic prediction was short term and already proven false. Turkey joining the EU was a long term prediction with no particular attached timeline, I think. It's harder to falsify.
If it was only things like these, no one would have a problem.
But in practice, anything other than "Hillary Clinton is completely healthy" and "Trump is a Russian puppet" is categorized as fake news.
This push against fake news is just the elites trying to hold onto the power of controlling the narrative.
By whom? No serious fact checking effort I've seen suffers from that problem.
There was a very recent example of this where Buzzfeed chose to publish an 'explosive' story about the Mueller investigation. So explosive was the story that the Mueller team took the completely unprecedented step of publicly clarifying that Buzzfeed's story was fake. [1] I doubt they simply made up the story. In reality they most likely simply failed to effectively carry out their due diligence, but this is in many ways no better because there is a major economic incentive to skip or engage in sloppy due diligence. When you run explosive stories you get substantial revenue gains due to the exclusive attention you gain. And there's also the risk that a story is true and, in the process of trying to validate it, you end up getting beat to the press by another media organization - once again hurting your revenue and visibility.
[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/2019/...
There are opinion pieces thinly disguised as "fact checks".
After all, it's unlikely we'll ever see a day where everyone agrees on everything so completely that no two humans disagree about anything! And as long as that's the case, we'd better know how to deal with people telling us things that are wrong.
The theory goes that seeing social media messages with obvious lies like "Put nails in your tyres for better winter traction" and "Shoot yourself with small calibre bullets to build an immunity to larger bullets" teaches people scepticism and rational thought they can apply to much more complex statements like "inflation is caused by the fed printing money" and "the highest crime areas are those with a lot of immigrants"
Does it work? Have we seen it working hitherto? You be the judge!
The problem here is that these "propagandists" cater to people's emotions in a very persuasive manner. It's not that it will blatantly tell you "Shoot yourself with small calibre bullets", but rather it will inseminate the thought that perhaps you should shoot your neighbor, out of fear. The message is so masterfully targeted and gamified that even if 1 person starts having more "critical thinking" and simply shrug off the information, there are 10 more people ready and willing.
Rwanda is possibly the best most recent counterpoint to this argument. Granted that the medium was radio as opposed to internet, and that there are therefore different regulatory mechanisms that can be applied (public airwaves vs TCP/IP) - but it shows the danger of getting people into a warped reality bubble.
https://blogs.library.duke.edu/rubenstein/2013/05/10/radio-i...
And also, I think science is never settled. Science is a never ending stream of questions, with every answer evoking multiple new questions to be answered. The idea that the "science is settled" has reared it's ugly head multiple times in the past, to be proven wrong every single time. What if bloodletting was as some point considered "settled science" and no discussion of alternatives was allowed? We would still be doing bloodletting, wouldn't we?
Are you honestly serious here? Do you not realize that there are many kids and people that legitimately can not vaccinate their own kids due to allergy or immune response issues? They compromise herd immunity and is the entire reason why we're seeing another measles outbreak!
Acting like there isn't a problem here is either being simply uninformed or deliberately ignorant. That's exactly why I have a problem with anti-vaxxers because they're threatening the lives of those around them because of some incredibly stupid and unfounded beliefs.
Take pertussis vaccine for example: pertussis may be deadly for newborns, but they cannot be vaccinated until they are of a certain age. We have here to vaccinate one group to protect another.
Is it ethical? Can we really mandate one group to risk their health to protect another?
One may say that in this case the risk is minimal and the benefits are great, but at this point we stop dealing with facts and go into emotional sphere.
One of the problems is that in the vaccination talks it's usually either "all vaccines are the godsend blessing" or "all vaccines are dealy poisons". A thought that some vaccines prevent thousands of deaths and some were just piggybacked by the "big pharma" is vehemently rejected by both sides.
The opinion is whether it is worth a very tiny risk of adverse reaction of a big group against a moderate risk of death of other people in a small group.
These amounts are all quantifiable, unlike a dumb trolley problem, but many people do not like tiny risks even if it were to save someone's life.
Can we blame parents for not willing to put their children's lives at small risk for saving some other adult?
I believe that should be the subject of the discussion, not whether vaccines cause autism (apparently they don't) or whether pharmaceutical corporations are greedy (yes, they are like any corporation).
And - as a separate, but related question - what do we do with religious exemptions here?
There is a small but noticeable component of kids who can't be vaccinated for other health reasons. It's also possible to catch illnesses before the scheduled vaccination date.
(A few years ago we were talking of the possibility of eradicating measles and polio, but the CIA blew that one with .. fake vaccinations)
Like some of the discussions around GDPR, it feels like there may be a cultural difference between the USA and EU in terms of how much government is trusted, and I wonder if that's a large part of the disagreements in these comments. I'm in the UK and trust the government not to overreach (although in the light of Brexit that trust is wearing very thin), and even if it did our independent judiciary would reign it in, as it has done many times in the past.
In that 866 page report the researchers analyze a great breadth of data and research on connections between vaccines and all sorts of nasty things. And one phrase you might find worth ctrl+fing is "The evidence is inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship between". You'll find it repeated constantly throughout the report as the academy researchers come to their conclusion on the validity (or lack thereof) of a causal link between vaccines and all sorts of nasty stuff. And for many of these nasty correlations while the evidence is insufficient claim a causal link, it's also insufficient to reject it. Not exactly what you'd call settled science.
Of course this does not justify turning against vaccinations. Even if there is a causal link found between vaccines and some of these various issues, the possibility of significant numbers of people choosing to not vaccinate would be catastrophic. For instance we're right now on the cusp of completely eliminating polio, much as we did smallpox. In fact you are currently more likely to get polio from a vaccine than in the wild. And some people might use that as a reason to stop vaccinating. But if they did, that would rapidly change. The one and only thing that's bringing us to where we are is people choosing to vaccinate. So it comes down to a matter of social responsibility. Vaccines are not without risk but whatever risk there is greatly outweighed by the collective benefits.
http://nationalacademies.org/HMD/Reports/2011/Adverse-Effect...
Let's say I'm someone that really hates vaccines. I begin spreading rumors throughout the internet that vaccines cause cancer. My evidence? Most of the people that have cancer had vaccines at one point in the past.
Now how does science disprove this? Through years of study, research and data collection over many decades. Even then, it would be hard to accept or reject a casual relationship between cancer and vaccines, because that is an almost endless set of data. All I would have to do is make up some new casual correlation between vaccines and Y as an attack vector. This is exactly how arguments against climate change are made as well. Science is never really settled, but we can reach a high level of confidence on how something works.
Worse, because of the way confidence intervals work, if you generate enough bad hypotheses and run experiments, eventually you find one where it appears to be true!
New vaccines are created and may have side effects. E.g. H1N1 vaccine causing narcolepsy in Europe recently: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/history/narcoleps...
Using the phrase "the science is settled" is silly, given that the creation and manufacturing of new vaccines isn't settled.