Hacker News Reader

Comment by RandallBrown | Hacker News Reader

In Neal Stephenson's latest book, that seems to be how he gets around the fake news problem.

The near future world signs everything with a personal identifier so they can prove they what people are seeing is genuine.

I imagine these identifiers could be extended to things like security cameras and things too so that there could be some verification that the video footage hasn't been doctored.

All of this of course relies on the general public getting the knowledge and tools to seamlessly do this verification on a daily basis. In the book it's mostly taken care of using google glass style wearables.

View on HN

The primary problem with fake news is not that people are fabricating evidence. Sure, that does happen on occasion but it is relatively rare and is usually debunked pretty quickly. The biggest issue is that there are sources that can't be trusted and consumers don't have the skills or tools to identify those untrustworthy sources or simply don't care that their sources might be biased. Fixing the first problem (which is all some type of signing certificate could hope to do) doesn't accomplish much if we can't also addresses the second problem.

Imo the problem with fake news is that by the time it's debunked (if), its effect has already happened and can't be undone.

That is really just a symptom of the second problem. Fake news can spread pretty far before it is debunked, but the fake news has to start somewhere. Maybe people get it from some untrustworthy news site, social media, or directly from the mouth of a habitually lying politician, but it almost never originates from a legitimate news source that has the skills, tools, and motivation to better assess the authenticity of the news. If people put less faith in those untrustworthy sources and waited for actual journalism to be done before reacting, fake news would be less of a problem.

I can honestly say I do not know a legitimate news site. For every topic that I have more than surface knowledge on the articles are always, almost with no exception, biased and limited to a single perspective which aligns with cultural expectations.

The exceptions are local news about local events that has no political angle, and occasionally investigative journalism.

The most common method that legitimate news sources use to bias news is by omission, and second by using a misleading context. Neither is strictly a lie, but the result is as much fake news as something fabricated.

Mainstream news is to a degree more problematic when they formulaically follow a narrative and don’t bother checking the assumptions and present misleading or overreprsenting information.

That’s because people are apt to believe those sources and not critically question them.

The problem is the masses of people who insist on believing unbelievable things. We don't have centralized media any more that can act as filters for wingnut ideas.

Pizza-gate is bonkers, but that doesn't mean there isn't a healthy segment of the population that believes it as a way to channel their collective hatred for someone. Which is itself just a way to solidify their group identity, much the same as the resurgence of flat-earthers who feed off of their own ignorance while proclaiming their supposed objectivity.

Pizzagate is bonkers but they were not that far off, with Epstein and all that

Everyone is downvoting you but the pizza gate conspiracy seemed ridiculous when it came out, and now it just seems like what they got wrong is that it probably wasn't happening at Cosmic Pizza, and was happening at a way more massive scale than they'd assumed.

I think the reason people are downvoting your comment (aside from the obvious reason, which is that it's a little low-effort) is that people didn't like pizzagate. It had an altright, Trumpy 'beware the deep state satan pedophile illuminati' feel to it that we oppose being true for identity reasons (ie, we are not those people who say trollish, unintellectual things like that!).

Although pizzagate is false, it's not as false (in a kind of Bayesian way) as it was before the Epstein island entered the public conscience.

There is also a problem with biased coverage that can be 100% factual. It is fake news in that it can craft a false perception of an issue that society then acts upon because people have some underlying belief that all comparable issues are granted equal coverage.

We already (mostly) solved that problem in the US with the Fairness Doctrine. Then we apparently decided because the problem was solved, we didn't need the regulation anymore. That ended exactly as you would expect, and exactly as it has every other time a regulation that's working is removed because it's "not necessary anymore".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

I wonder what would happen if we tried applying that today. For example, would climate change qualify? Scientists are pretty one sided on it, but politicians and the general public are not. So does it have to be controversial for the experts, or for the general population? I can also think of issues where scientists aren't in agreement but the population mostly is. What about if there are numerous different sides to an issue? Imagine giving fairness to some religious matter, given how many different religions there are.

Overall, I just have a hard time imagining the details of how it would apply in today's world.

I recommend reading "Fall; or Dodge in Hell" because Stephenson addresses just about everything you mentioned.

It's not the primary focus of the story, but it does at least quickly attempt to answer these problems to advance the narrative in a reasonable way.

For anyone else not up to date, Neal Stephenson's latest novel is Fall; or, Dodge in Hell: https://www.nealstephenson.com/fall,-or-dodge-in-hell.html

I read that current camera manufacturers already have some e-signature code inside cameras, but it is hackable..

Yeah, in the book they used distributed ledgers and quantum computing to make it a bit more secure.

Is the new book any good? I heard bad reviews, and it turned me off. I usually love everything NS does though.

I'm only about 2/3 of the way through but I really enjoy it.

The NY Times seems to like it. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/books/review/fall-or-dodg...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com