Facebook labelled 'digital gangsters' by report on fake news | Hacker News Reader

Facebook labelled 'digital gangsters' by report on fake news

theguardian.com

37 pointsd0ne12 comments

What happens to a generation raised in a world where misinformation is criminalized? Does critical thinking lapse? Do people just assume all published works are authoritative by definition? Not an experiment i’d care to see played out.

The current fake news tug-o-war might actually make citizens more scrutinizing of their news, not less.

Critical thinking doesn't scale.

I can only apply critical thinking to my area of expertise, software development, and a few others I happen to have experience outside work. When I read stuff about unrelated matters like art, medicine, psychology, or politics, I only have some heuristics to detect obvious BS or bad actors, but they are very inaccurate because I'm not an expert.

More to the point, you can't apply "critical thinking" to a statement in isolation. You can only apply it using the context of things that you already know, or other sources you can get at. If trust in those is destroyed, it becomes genuinely impossible to know things.

(If you want a not too controversial example of this, look at popular nutritional science, which is a battleground of constantly shifting ideas and discredited experiments)

The actual report by the UK Parliament is here:

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmcu...

The "list or conclusions and recommendations" on pages 89-98 are worth studying though, see:

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmcu...

Now provided we agree that regulation is the correct way to solve this, why not regulate instead AdTech? This seems to address the root of the problem, rather than trusting AI will fix it (as is the promise by the big players) and forcing everyone else (whoever is left on the free web ... and running on old stacks like phpforum for a fringe community ... OR those who aren't convinced that AI is a solution) to burden them with what looks like a "Ministry of Truth" type of regulatory body. These might as well just take down the community/service (because it never made money anyway and now it's just too much of a burden).

I'm more concerned about government intervention into speech and policing what is appropriate than I am fake news, which a recent study showed wasn't even that widespread.

Can you link the study? As far as I'm aware, even a relatively small proportion of misleading news, if it hits the right political nerves, could cause real damage to a society, so I'm interested in how the study defines "not that widespread", and what the implications of that are.

Which is exactly why state-level propaganda campaigns against other states are so persistent; weaponised fakenews.

And why governments are so sensitive about inbound 'fakery'

http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586.full

Funny enough the headline the media took from this study was that older people shared fake news more...you probably saw that part everywhere. What they didn't share is that the study says it is actually pretty rare in every age group.

Most people on here tend to be anti-censorship, based on my impression of past discussion re: EG recent Tumblr content changes, but seem to be largely in favour of it when it comes to "fake news".

I think there's a political bias at play - fake news is usually attributed to the Right, and HN seems to be a lose coalition of progressives, neoliberals, and a few hard left who all dislike the Right.

People can get blind about things that achieve their goals

I think there's definitely truth in that, but also probably a measure of political bias in turn. Another major cause of difference in opinion one person may have on censorship, in addition to or instead of any blind political bias, is that "censorship" is simply a broad term, and therefore it's not hypocritical to consider oneself generally "anti censorship", but admit its necessity at times. But obviously most things work that way - the distinction is mostly semantics, since nearly anybody who considers themselves "pro X" or "anti X" is, in practice, not an absolutist on X, which is pretty reasonable. Rather, being "pro" or "anti" such broad concepts is typically an expression of opinion that is strictly relative to general societal trends surrounding X at the time.

That's not in fashion to think this year.

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