Sweden creates agency to combat fake news ahead of election | Hacker News Reader

Sweden creates agency to combat fake news ahead of election

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30 pointstareqak22 comments

Sweden doesn't want fake news to influence their elections. That makes sense.

The government of Sweden is going to influence/control what news gets reported that affects elections in Sweden. That's... much scarier. It's creating a tool for tyrants. It may be done with the best of intentions, and current events may be showing the need, but... do you really trust the sitting government to control the news leading up to an election? If you do, do you trust the next one to do so?

What are your options when you are stuck between a rock and a hard place?

Much like a defensive military force (scary to have the military in your own country), it can be misused.

One option is to preserve freedom of expression even when you disagree with what is being said.

Cool. Express yourself freely, I'll pay a couple hundred folks under the table to organically insert into conversations some anecdotes about how errantmind loves kicking puppies/harasses his co-workers/caused {scandal of the week}, and we'll let the free market of ideas decide between the opposing viewpoints.

No worries, it will have absolutely zero impact on my life. I'm not in any way dependent on public opinion for my income or social life.

Even if I was dependent on public opinion, there is a wide divide between libel/slander and people voicing their opinion on any given subject.

Please don't try to protect people from themselves by limiting their speech. It is patronizing and authoritarian.

It also depends what do you do to "counteract disinformation". Do you censor? Or do you improve your side of the story? Would that be bad?

This invention of the connotations of 'misinformation' is much like the invention of the word Terrorist after 9/11. It was done to scare and shame people into lockstep.

Nothing needs to be done. The problem was disproportionately expanded to shift even more power into the hands of authoritarians. Just because someone is wrong doesn't mean they should be silenced or censured.

No doubt this characterisation is bring misused, or better, there surely is a lot of state-sponsored misinformation about misinformation.

That said, not every information out there is genuine opinion that just falls on one or another side of some point on the spectrum.

There is a form of "information" that is constructed as a cheap flood of random claims that are cheap to produce and hard to confute. (Aka https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law)

Now imagine you recognize this latter as a serious problem in society. How can you approach to it without confusing it with the former?

Honestly, I don't know, but I'd rather there be no confrontation than taking away people's fundamental rights

I think there is vast gulf between jailing people for saying things and rebutting bullshit online.

The fact we as a society struggle to even discuss the difference is worrying.

The "slippery slope" meme has poisoned our ability to see nuance and pushed otherwise reasonable people into extremist positions.

I agree with you, preserving freedom of expression is important, and it is easy to enforce irl, but online today it is easy to drown out people's opinions by flooding fb/twitter/comment-sections by bot-farms, the winner today is those who controls the biggest network/bot-farms, that is harmful for freedom of expression, it is easy/fast to claim stuff, but it usually takes many hours to prove that something is false, during this time it is easy to flood with many new claims, people usually has limited time to research claims and ordinary people are usually too lazy to look up stuff, that makes a big imbalance to the discussion, there is also many more ways harmful players gets the upper hand against good players online.

Doing nothing at this point is harmful to freedom of expression, but what Sweden is doing about it can only time tell if it is good or bad, but at least they see there is a problem that needs to be solved.

Are these bot farms really all that much of a problem? As in, do we have a very clear grasp of the real magnitude of the problem?

> Doing nothing at this point is harmful to freedom of expression

This seems like Newspeak to me. Stifling freedom of expression in the name of freedom of expression is contradictory if it is abused as powers of this type always are.

It is is a problem today, and it is a problem that is growing, censoring is not going to stop it, I feel that today that it is the private sector that do most censoring, censoring by states/countries in the western world seems a "small" problem, that is more transparent what they censor, as opposed to corporate censoring by the big players in the social media, that mostly is driven by money, I feel that there still is too many "boomers" in politics that is too naive/uneducated about how internet works, I think that only when younger generations takes over in politics as they more so will know the harsh truth that censoring on the internet only hurt the good players.

All you have to do is the give access to all data, all minute details and all the time. Britain seems to do that with Covid. Of course we ourselves have no time for those details. But then there appears a bunch of independent analyzers, and you learn with time that some are full shit and some are not, like John Cambdell. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF9IOB2TExg3QIBupFtBDxg

What prevents the next government from setting this up anyway? If your threat model is “the other side getting elected is inevitable but we can’t ever let them control what the government does” you’ve already lost.

It’s cliche to bring up Hitler, but I’ll do it anyway. The Weimar republic made some very weak attempts to try to limit Nazi propaganda, and they successfully shouted them down with cries of “free speech!” Of course one of the first things they did once in power was to shut down any newspaper they didn’t like.

Fair point. Still, don't build the machine for them. Make them build it themselves, for two reasons. First, it slows them down at least a little bit. Second, it makes it clear to others that this isn't normal - that they're going further than anyone else has been willing to go. Those two things are still useful, even if they can in fact build the machine and start using it.

Do you not build any artillery weapons in fear that your enemy will take it and use it against you? That might very well be a bad idea if you’re already under a siege and are losing. I guess it’s hard to make a general statement that applies in all situations.

The Ministry of Truth. Now even better: The European Union Ministry of Truth. Luckily there is no Britons inventing falsehoods. Poland and other riffraff will have no say in absolute truthness, of course.

Maybe i don’t read enough history, but i wonder: does censorship after-the-fact actually work or does it backfire?

In places where the news has been censored for a while (Russia, China), the public seems to accept it and believe the biased views.

But if people are exposed to “fake news” and then see those news sites being censored and replaced with contradictory information, wouldn’t they just become more distrusted and paranoid?

Everything the government tells you is true, so they would be the perfect group to censor fake news.

Step one: firewall Sweden's internet to block everything coming and going from Russia.

Good idea, in theory I agree with you, but unfortunate there exist vpn, and there exist idiots and russia friendly individuals that has no qualms redistrubute propaganda/missinformatin, some even belive what they reshare.

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