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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> Should people be allowed to say and write lies in a "real" democracy?

Yes. In democracy, the public are the arbiters of truth. Particularly political truth.

Free speech doesn’t mean consequence-free speech. Cooling-down periods, mandatory preservation and disclosure requirements, et cetera are both prudent and commonplace. Court-supervised anti-fraud statute, which punishes for the harm done by the lie, not the speech itself, also helps.

Governments should not have the power to silence their critics. It’s a conflict of interest between the rulers and the ruled, and historically marches towards poverty, misery and instability.

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And just spelling it out because "people should be allowed to tell lies" is terrible marketing:

There is no way to deduce the truth using the tools in the Government's toolbox or in public discourse. The more questions systems like the courts have to answer the more mistakes they will make; they aren't for discerning the truth instead only checking that standards of evidence have been met. There are a bunch of things that are untrue but that can be demonstrated to a high standard of evidence.

When governments try to do things that are impossible there are unwelcome side effects. Since they logically can't police the truth any attempt to do so will not have the intended outcome.

What are false things that have strong evidence behind them?

> What are false things that have strong evidence behind them?

Eh, the history of science is littered with these. From early theories of vision involving beams cast out by our eyes [1] to phlogiston [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emission_theory_(vision)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory

The difference being that science doesn’t consider truth a single absolute but a boundary on the body of knowledge. Old theorems are replaced by “truer” ones.

EDIT: autocorrect

There are the pre- and post-execution exonerations [0] which are some good striking examples with human interest stories behind them. But really pick up a stack of court records proved to a substantial-evidence standard but not a beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard. Bunch of those are going to be situations where a it looks like something happened but actually a different thing happened.

There simply isn't a formal way of determining truth. If there was it'd be in use somewhere. All the processes that work best are ones where decisions are made in a fair process where evidence is invoked, but there isn't a reasonable argument that evidence always paints an accurate picture. It simply can't. There is no process that gets all the decisions right; evidence based decision making is not enough.

If it turned out courts correctly identified the truth 80% of the time when working through cases I'd be impressed. And that is where we have formal experts doing their best with controls against bias and the potential to have independent judges making decisions. The best legal standard we have is 'beyond reasonable doubt' - I've been in plenty of situations where that standard would accept a bad conclusion; eminently reasonable people who try to make good, thoroughly considered decisions still make mistakes. Reasonable people were once extremely sexist and racist; for an easy example. For something as wide-ranging as political truth there is simply no hope.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exonerated_death_row_i...

Pretty much every conclusion drawn from all studies where P < .05 is used as a proxy for truth, but which are later incapable of replication.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20895433

> In democracy, the public are the arbiters of truth. Particularly political truth.

Sadly, they are increasingly the arbiters of scientific truth. Part of me keeps expecting to hear some senator calling for the repeal of the law of gravity.

Perhaps that's because scientists had abused, the public trust in the not too distant past?

(that includes paper publishes as well authors).

I am interested however to learn/understand opinions of how to make the situation better.

For example, updating insensitive model that would include critical reviews of published work, independent confirmation of published work, and so on.

There could be a bias-adjustment model where if heavy majority of the government or business grants are looking for a particular 'answer' within a given subject-area, there need to be a counter-balance model (that, again, incentivizes a plausible discourse)

Today's intensives model for academia, appears to give lot of weight to # of papers being published.

In the areas where statistical significance of experiments/observations (rather than provable theoretical result) plays an important role -- this particular measure of 'one's academic achievement', could be responsible for the 'trust issues'

So if I go out posting "JumpCrisscross is a child molester" everywhere (only, say I found your real name somehow), you're good with that? No, that would be defamation and you could get a court order to get it taken down, unless I had enough evidence to prove the claim.

> But governments should not have the power to decide if criticism is truthful or not

They do, though. And for good reason, too. You wouldn't want to lose your job over a fraudulent hitpiece.

Definitely the government shouldn’t be able to stop criticisms, but for outright lies, wouldn’t libel or slander laws apply?

> for outright lies, wouldn’t libel or slander laws apply?

That would require the slandered party (a) prove it’s false and (b) demonstrate harm. There is also good reason for most slander and libel law withholding many remedies from public figures and politicians.

In this case, a department of a single-party city-state issued a takedown notice against allegations of election tampering. It is as illegitimate as it is Streisand-effect inducingly stupid.

Uncoincidentally, members of the PAP have a reputation for being rather aggressive in suing people for libel.

I think somewhere you have to accept that certain statements aren't true or false. What has changed recently is the willingness of people to view the statements of others as "lying" as opposed to having a different opinion. Unf, when the plaintiff is the government this becomes even more tricky (and I think a reasonable person would conclude that the PAP have used the legal system to supress criticism...I love Singapore, I love LKY...but it is what it is).

That would require knowing you made the post, and since most fake news is generated by anon FB pages, who do you sue?

The answer is nobody. You have no recourse unless you're in the US or one of the few other states that Facebook will listen to.

One of the consequences might be that if you say a lie about someone else, they will sue you for libel. And in an ideal world, the lie would be discovered and you'd lose that suit. So asking a user on facebook to remove a lie, then asking facebook to remove that lie, sounds like a fair thing to do in a "real" democracy.

> Governments should not have the power to silence their critics

I agree completely, but we are talking about the case when they are trying to silence a lie. That's different than critics.

In the US it is almost impossible for a public figure, especially a political figure, to win a libel lawsuit.

In theory, a deliberate, malicious false statement against a public figure would count as libel; but in practice basically everything is allowed. This prevents politicians from intimidating their critics with lawsuits.

EDITED TO ADD: In fact in the US there is pretty much a constant stream of false statements about every politician, and I can't recall any politician ever winning a libel case. Devin Nunes is trying currently, and basically making a fool of himself.

Wouldn't placing a notice on content deemed fake be more like what we do with slander/libel. Court reports create a record of the lie which aids the public in deciding who to deal with and creates an additional motivation not to lie. It also allows a person to disagree with the judgement.

"This content has been determined to be fake: [evidence or link to evidence]"

That would be my preference.

As an example I assume you're familiar with the treatment family of Sandy Hook victims have gotten? Where they have to deal with constant harassment and threats from people that believe it is a hoax and those that encourage them?

If you were to slap a content disclaimer saying 'this content is fake', they would just use that as fuel and proof that the government doesn't want you to know the truth. The lie directly harms people by simply existing even if you add a disclaimer.

> Court-supervised anti-fraud statute, which punishes for the harm done by the lie, not the speech itself, also helps.

Except the courts... in fact nobody, has any power to punish anyone for most of the fake news spread on Facebook in my country since it's all posted by anonymously controlled pages.

Isn't there a litany of examples where the government has the power to decide and enforce truthfulness? Stuff like health claims and protected designation of origin.

> health claims, protected designation of origin, and public schooling

None of these are like the allegations of election tampering the article discusses, which is squarely in the realm of First Amendment-protected speech in America.

Yes. While there’s arguments to be made against those laws, it seems to be relatively harmless to allow the government to be the arbiter of truth in a few limited situations where the truth is fairly easy to ascertain.

(What’s that you say? The truth of claims about the medical efficacy of drugs are actually hard to ascertain? That’s true, but you’ll note that the standard of truth required by law is easy to ascertain — the question is not whether your drug cures cancer but whether you’ve gone through a specific FDA-approved process to test whether it does, and passed.)

The only institution in a democratic society in general that acts to determine truth is the court system. While a countless number of bureaucrats may make routine judgements about the truth, any disputes over that tend to head to a court.

In court trials, the smallest details of truth are liable to be deliberated and argued over extensively, often producing outcomes that satisfy no interested parties.

It’s easy to have an opinion about what is an “outright lie”, it’s more or less impossible to prove it, and it is literally Orwellian to establish an authority to preside over it.

Ironically, i come across quite a lot of outrageous health claims in Singapore. Cancer-curing smoothies for example.

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