I for one would welcome a mandatory fact check on all political speech, with clear separation of facts and opinion.
Incidentally, the reason I can't link to a more mainstream article about the ownership of Temasek Holdings is probably that the more mainstream outlets seem to have been strongarmed into pulling them down.[2]
[1] https://www.asiasentinel.com/society/singapores-lee-family-a...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/business/media/25times.ht...
The trouble is we are human, and no one is truly independent. Put that together with the classic phrase, there are lies, damned lies, and then statistics. Facts can be shown in a way that manipulates, is that ok or not?
Who decides, is the crucial question?
Are you willing to give the same power you want, to tell us what facts are, to your political opponents?
Not sure what's up with this thought, as it's repeated many times in the comments here.
You don't give power to the opponents, they either take it, or they are elected. They'll be able to make their own laws, or cancel old ones, regardless of what you want or do now.
In case you actually misunderstood the post you are replying to, the point was that these checks are not up to the task (as in "what you are describing sounds much, much better than it works in reality. How nice it would be if it actually were like that")
Anyway, we have constitutional democaracy where I live, and almost every article is qualified by "unless law tells othervise". Even speech is restricted, you can't say anything you like in TV, it's regulated and has an oversight bureaucracy. It's just made so that law is not targeted at any particular party, but on particular behavior.
It's times like these that I'm glad Singapore has an open and mostly uncensored internet access policy.
As the dominant party in Singapore controls more than two-thirds of parliament [1], they have been able to push through constitutional changes without much consultation [2] — a recent example was the increase in the private-sector requirement for candidates of our Presidency (head of state), and it being reserved for people from a specific ethnic group [3].
Mainstream media in Singapore is highly regulated and mainly spreads the government angle, which leaves the internet as one of the few open platforms for dissenting perspectives to be spread.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_Parliament_of_Singapore
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Singapore#Amen...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_elections_in_Sing...
The fact that we have courts of law where judges routinely make decisions about difficult, gray area questions, tells me that this is a solved problem.
I can imagine a special court (or board or whatever; just as long as it falls under the judiciary branch and is therefore independent) set up to make quick rulings. There should of course be a way to appeal the rulings to a normal court.
That's an easy one, yes it is ok. If we just get rid of outright lies, that will do tremendous positive change in the news sphere. Manipulation can be subjective, but facts cannot. Manipulation is best left to the apprehension of the individual end users, because in other case it will just get more intricate and will never be fully caught anyway. Plus the determining of what is manipulation and what is legitimate weighing of facts is always going to be subjective, so there is nothing to do here.
1. The sun is yellow
2. The sun is white
3. The sun is green
Which of those statements are false and which are true? Only facts please.
- Clearly a lie and criminally so.
- Might be a lie or not, but out of the scope of this law.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough.
I think most of that is probably already adequately covered by existing laws, but that selective (non)enforcement is potentially a big problem.
Criminalizing "lies" sounds like the exact sort of thing that would be useful to cover up abuses of power. We already saw how "Espionage" was used for undeclared Wars with the Pentagon Papers. Now imagine Cointelpro also being covered or police brutality.
Edit: remove "Russians".
I'm from Europe. We have euvsdisinfo.eu site here, which raises this issue: https://euvsdisinfo.eu/why-facebook-is-more-revealing-on-nud... . USA just ignores it.
A mandatory fact check (by whom?) will end up suppressing 'incorrect' opinions and thus limit choice to one or two 'approved' candidates. (which is not far from what the Chinese government wants to do when it says that HK candidates must be approved first)
For example, hate speech laws in Canada (or many other countries), or anti-discrimination laws? While they might have their detractors, it's a stretch to claim that they (in particular) have led us to a freedom apocalypse.
> For example, a friend (a German national currently working in Washington) referred off-handedly to Singapore as a “police state” in a recent personal email. (She has never been here.) [...] That’s not all that perplexes Americans and some other Westerners. Singapore is a “police state”? If so, well, where are the police? One hardly ever sees one, and one never sees a uniformed policeman on a beat on the street. There is no visible acute poverty here, no beggars on the street, no evidence of homelessness, no gun violence, no graffiti, and women can walk alone at all hours of the day and night anywhere on the island without having to worry about being accosted.
They say if you want to see a policeman, go to the malls and find one of the cardboard cutouts.
[1] https://www.the-american-interest.com/2019/11/21/the-puzzle-...