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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

I don’t really buy this argument that to do anything involving the accuracy of claims there needs to be some new dystopian “ministry of truth.” We already have really common well-accepted laws that involve the truth value of certain claims. False advertising is illegal. Fraud is illegal. Lying under oath is illegal. Am I to understand that people oppose all of these things?

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You didn't seem to understand the argument, as the person you are responding to is essentially saying "this is already illegal, and that's where that should be solved"; the issue is that in addition to making it illegal, people also seem to believe it should be impossible, which requires not just "people can look at the ad, decide it is false, and then take the person to court and make it go very very badly for them" but also "Facebook should somehow manage to block these ads in the first place, preferably as immediately and automatically as possible", which goes above and beyond "it is illegal" and really requires the "API" version of truth.

I must not understand, because my understanding is that lying in political ads is absolutely not illegal.

Slander is still a civil liability, though there is an understandably high bar to prove slander against a politician.

Correct, you do not understand the argument. Even if it was made explicitly illegal, you can create your own "facts".

I understand that claims can be generated in such a way to make them difficult to verify or dispute. I agree with that part of the parent comment.

My criticism was not aimed at that part of the parent comment, but rather at the suggestion that an absurd “ministry of truth” with a “correctness API“ is necessary to have a system that recognizes that some claims are true and some are not.

How do you see the system working?

> "Facebook should somehow manage to block these ads in the first place, preferably as immediately and automatically as possible"

Nobody said that. Here Facebook know it's false but does nothing against it. It's not a question of efficiency at all.

>False advertising is illegal. Fraud is illegal. Lying under oath is illegal.

Cool, they're already illegal. What exactly do you want to be implemented then?

Doesn't false advertising only apply to commercial advertising?

Yes, but in that case it's not the TV network that gets punished, but the advertiser. The parent is saying the same should happen here.

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