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Comment by partiallypro | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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