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Perhaps if the definition of 'misinformation' is expanded to include legitimate but politically inconvenient information.
by _rpd 10y ago
Perhaps if the definition of 'misinformation' is expanded to include legitimate but politically inconvenient information.
- leesalminen 10y agoThere is currently a subset of the internet talking about how the Earth is flat. While that may seem to be "misinformation" to you or I, why is it "wrong" for it to be shared/discussed/thought about on Facebook?
- _rpd 10y agoYou're probably posing this question to HN as a whole, rather than me, however, my comment was focusing on the term 'exactly' in the comment to which I was replying. I personally think that there is legitimate censorship (child porn, detailed instructions for constructing weapons of mass destruction, etc), but that the vast majority of 'fake news' and even outright false information doesn't fall into that scope. Even there I have to hedge though, since some false information can cause very harmful panic.
- leesalminen 10y agoAh, you are correct. My apologies, and it was not meant as an attack on you personally. I agree with your examples, of course. I'm not against common sense restrictions. But, I think these should be decided upon up front with a transparent review process for adding new categories. To leave that open ended would inevitably lead to abuse.
- woodruffw 10y agoThe fact that you chose a relatively benign falsehood (the earth being flat) reveals that you, yourself, understand that it's "wrong" for it to be shared in a way that incorrectly reflects its truth value. It shouldn't be our concern if conspiracy theorists decide to share misinformation among themselves. It becomes our concern when they take advantage of human emotions and insufficient algorithmic filtering to manipulate their way to the top of the newsfeeds of major social sites.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- anigbrowl 10y agoIt's not wrong for it to be shared, but nor is it wrong to automatically affix a tag saying '90% bullshit.' I would much prefer that such things weren't in demand; it'd be great to live in a world where every adult person had reliable bullshit detectors, so we wouldn't be swamped in logical fallacies and ancillary nonsense, but in the meantime the speed and connectedness of our social technologies has vastly outpaced the general population's ability to digest the available information, and so the disease of populism has broken out again as the new media go through their adolescent stage.
- jon-wood 10y agoSadly I doubt adding the hypothetical bullshit tag would help. The sort of people sharing and reading this stuff are ones who want to believe it. If you start tagging it as fake they'll just fall back to the argument that The Man doesn't want you to know the truth. There's no quick fix for this. It's going to take a generation or two of concerted education from an early age in critical thinking, and somehow I doubt making people question what they're told is going to be a priority for the next four years.
- jayess 10y agoThere's no "perhaps" about it.
- android521 10y agoYou can be certain that it will be used that way.
- Inconel 10y agoAll this talk of fake news and censorship increasingly makes me feel as though journalism is abdicating its responsibility to be a voice of dissent and skepticism by being entirely too cozy with corporate and government interests in exchange for access. This quote has been attributed to many people over the years but I've always been fond of the saying: News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising.