3 ms·

>What do you propose as an alternative? Simply allow people to intentionally mislead people for their own gain? Yes? That's kind of one of the founding princi

>What do you propose as an alternative? Simply allow people to intentionally mislead people for their own gain? Yes? That's kind of one of the founding principles of liberal democracy. It was a good idea in 1791, and it's still a good idea today. The left is flipping its shit about "fake news" these days, but even in the US they've gone through far worse eras in terms of news reliability. The fact that you used to have gatekeepers who were more or less honest is an artifact of the startup costs of the television and newspaper industries, not some nirvanal state that has collapsed into darkness. Seriously, go take a look at some of the shit pamphleteers were up to in the 1800s. The state of affairs today is nothing. Democracy can survive people lying. It can't survive granting the government the ability to determine which "facts" the people are allowed to believe.

Dylan16807 10y ago
> one of the founding principles No, it's an ugly consequence of the principle that probably can't be disentangled from it.
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
> The fact that you used to have gatekeepers who were more or less honest is an artifact of the startup costs of the television and newspaper industries, not some nirvanal state that has collapsed into darkness. Actually, it was a result of treating things like the airwaves as a public trust and imposing stuff like the Fairness Doctrine.
okreallywtf 10y ago
>Democracy can survive people lying. It can't survive granting the government the ability to determine which "facts" the people are allowed to believe. This only holds assuming we have time to work things out naturally - unfortunately that is not the case at least in the context of climate change to ignore all other issues. Of course if you drink the fake-news coolaid you'll debate that climate change is happening or that its not man-made or wherever the goal-post has been moved to today. Hey everyone's opinion is the same though right? Your fact is my fiction! We're not talking the esoterics of democratic theory, we're talking the basic ability to educate people well enough to make decisions affecting the survival of our species as we know it. To me its very similar to taking no action on climate change because the market will eventually handle it. It all assumes sufficient stability for sufficient time and that may not be a safe assumption anymore. I never suggested the government specifically take action to say who can say what, but that doesn't mean that there can't be an open ranking system used by search engines and social media to people from accidentally falling into fake news through a ad that looks like a link from a more reputable location.

Dylan16807 10y ago

> one of the founding principles No, it's an ugly consequence of the principle that probably can't be disentangled from it.

eli_gottlieb 10y ago

> The fact that you used to have gatekeepers who were more or less honest is an artifact of the startup costs of the television and newspaper industries, not some nirvanal state that has collapsed into darkness. Actually, it was a result of treating things like the airwaves as a public trust and imposing stuff like the Fairness Doctrine.

okreallywtf 10y ago

>Democracy can survive people lying. It can't survive granting the government the ability to determine which "facts" the people are allowed to believe. This only holds assuming we have time to work things out naturally - unfortunately that is not the case at least in the context of climate change to ignore all other issues. Of course if you drink the fake-news coolaid you'll debate that climate change is happening or that its not man-made or wherever the goal-post has been moved to today. Hey everyone's opinion is the same though right? Your fact is my fiction! We're not talking the esoterics of democratic theory, we're talking the basic ability to educate people well enough to make decisions affecting the survival of our species as we know it. To me its very similar to taking no action on climate change because the market will eventually handle it. It all assumes sufficient stability for sufficient time and that may not be a safe assumption anymore. I never suggested the government specifically take action to say who can say what, but that doesn't mean that there can't be an open ranking system used by search engines and social media to people from accidentally falling into fake news through a ad that looks like a link from a more reputable location.