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"Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts" Thankfully, we've learned a few things since then and liberal (classic definition, not American

• jadedhacker 9y ago
  Unfortunately, there are voices in the foreign policy establishment that are openly advocating for a "ministry of truth" https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/atlantic-council-explains-why-we-need-to-be-propagandized-for-our-own-good-fd3470254ea5 https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/atlantic-council-explains...
  • kristianc 9y ago
    Caitlyn Johnstone is a 9/11 truther, and not representative of any 'foreign policy establishment', imagined or otherwise.
    • jadedhacker 9y ago
      Fwiw, she is criticizing someone advocating this policy if you read the article. EDIT: I should mention I do not necessarily endorse her views with respect to 9/11.
      • kristianc 9y ago
        Her views on the Douma gas attack and the Skripal poisoning (she takes the Kremlin line on both), are also well outside the political mainstream. As a UK citizen, the implication that Britain was involved in poisoning its own citizens is not unlike how many Americans feel about '9/11 was a false flag'.
        • jadedhacker 9y ago
          I haven't followed Skripal, but in the case of all attacks, I would like the fp establishment to wait for UN inspectors to render a report based on evidence before declaring whodunit. The mainstream political opinion got us into Iraq, Vietnam, sold arms to the Indonesians in East-Timor, and concocted a nuclear missile gap with Russia that never existed. I don't think it deserves any credence except where concrete evidence is provided (and this goes for everyone else outside the mainstream too).
        • robotrout 9y ago
          Now that there are actually investigators on the ground, we can begin to answer those questions. Until the OPCW releases their report, we don't know that their was any gas released there at all. If there was, we won't know who released it. If one were to ignore political biases, I think they would admit that there was more motive for the rebels to stage a gas attack to create international pressure for a cease-fire that allows them to escape a surrounded and hopeless position, than for Assad to bring the wrath of the world down upon himself to gas a completely surrounded and hopeless enemy. If you don't at least admit that such a thing warrants investigation, you are not being honest. Were you troubled at how quickly the "political mainstream" came to consensus on what happened there, before any investigation had occurred?
        • jessaustin 9y ago
          Oh good grief. "Kremlin line", really? Why are we even worried about what she thinks on topics besides the one under discussion? Does this person's suspicions of various war pretexts have anything to do with her disapproval of a proposed truth ministry?
      • nickodell 9y ago
        1) She's criticizing the creation of a government-run media organization, not the creation of an org that punishes media organizations for false news. These things have different costs and benefits. Also, believe it or not, government-funded media already exists. For example, there's Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, the various spokespeople of government agencies like the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Health and Human Services, etc etc. With that in mind: why should one more new media agency be uniquely offensive? 2) Many of these arguments seem vague and conspiratorial. For example, it asserts that plutocrats really control all of our media. For this, it cites another article by the same author, which talks about Jeff Bezos acquiring Washington Post. That seems like a pretty big jump to me. 3) Many of these arguments argue things that do not support her point. For example, it claims that the media is pro-establishment. Okay, so what? The establishment has some good qualities. Imagine the skit from Life of Brian, "What have the Romans ever done for us?" but s/romans/establishment/.
        • zeth___ 9y ago
          Bad example. When the Roman empire fell the average life expectancy increased in all regions [0] and [1]. Turns out complex societies are used to funnel wealth to the richest at the expense of the poorest. Who would have thought, apart from anyone who has studied them. [0] The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy, chapters 15 and 16 [1] Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070
        • jadedhacker 9y ago
          The reason you think these points are unsupported is because there is a large context that people on the left are familiar with but the rest of us opinion is not because it is not regularly discussed in corporate media. For instance, the work by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent documents how mainstream news consistently reinforces government narratives, even when they are based on lies (Iraq, Vietnam, etc). These organizations you mention are in fact propaganda outlets intended for foreign audiences or literally government agencies, they don't regularly directly criticize US foreign policy on other than a tactical basis. The Jeff Bezos story is an example of the larger story of media consolidation where the majority of US media is owned by a handful of corporations. How often will such news organizations report conflicts of interest or report critically on their bosses? The establishment position is bloodthirsty. That's a big point of contention.
• lifeisstillgood 9y ago
  i think something akin to libel laws might be interesting - if you knowingly publish untruths about me that's libel - about society in general that's ... fake news and you can be civility liable?
  • wilsonnb 9y ago
    The problem always ends up being "who decides what is not true?". Many people think that such a thing is not possible, or that the giving the Government such a power would be too much. I personally think I could be persuaded to give such a power to the judiciary branch. I'd have to think about it a lot more before coming to a final decision, though.
    • lifeisstillgood 9y ago
      We already have what is not true in Libel laws. And indeed in every branch of the law. (it's true he did rob the bank / breach the contract) for me the issue is not truth but laziness. No one decides if it is fake news or a breach of contract until the expensive court process is kicked off - someone wants to force the function to return. The cost is implying there is a sufficient loss (pace Peter Theiel) - and so it's worth deciding if this thing is true. Truth is a slippery concept - and i would far rather - like you- we did not have a department deciding upfront what is or is not truth. plus this idea might have the pleasing side effect of ministerial pronouncements being testable in court - although this is politics. Johnson's "350 million a week" bus was denounced as untrue from many quarters - but it was still a winning slogan - so perhaps the problem is still not fake news, but what people want to believe and why.
    • zenhack 9y ago
      The standard answer under US law is the jury; the concern you raise is deeply embedded in our legal system.
      • wilsonnb 9y ago
        I don't think that juries decide what's true and what's not. They decide whether the evidence presented to them is sufficient to show that an event or events happened. My understanding is that even in defamation suits they are mostly trying to prove that person A said thing X about person C and then prove that person C was harmed because of it. However, I am honestly not sure if it's just American first amendment indoctrination that makes me think that is significantly different than deciding what is true and what isn't.
• da_chicken 9y ago
  Citizenry will do what they always have: accept the narrative that benefits them the most or that they've been indoctrinated to accept without questioning. The Internet isn't going to magically change human nature. That doesn't mean that we need a Ministry of Truth a la Brazil or 1984, but this isn't an either-or issue. The Fairness Doctrine[0] was a fairly nice compromise. We have long required advertisers to be truthful, even using the extremely broad standard of "truth" set by the FTC. Why shouldn't news organizations be held to a similar ethical or moral standard? Does it benefit society if the only opinions broadcast as fact are filtered by corporate interests? That may be better than being filtered by government interests, but it's still not in the best interests of the public, is it? 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
  • testvox 9y ago
    How would you apply the fairness doctrine to the web though. Will I have to host opposing viewpoints on my blog or face fines? The fairness doctrine made sense back when your ability to broadcast your opinions was limited by the shared medium of the radio spectrum. But now that anyone with any viewpoint can broadcast to everyone via the Internet the fairness doctrine doesn't make sense.
    • solarkraft 9y ago
      Why? You're still spreading information and view points ...
      • CrystalLangUser 9y ago
        Why? Why would some random blog be held at the same standard at all as a newspaper?
        • pavlov 9y ago
          Paradoxically there are many people who are conditioned to believe the random blog over the newspaper. People have been told to "think for themselves" and "do their own research", and so when they stumble on a conspiracy-minded blog, it feels like a more authentic voice than mainstream media. I don't know what the solution is. It's impossible and unreasonable to expect individual bloggers to hold the same standard as newspapers traditionally did. Maybe social networks could do something to educate readers?
• wilsonnb 9y ago
  It's not productive to tell those who disagree with you to grow up. There are serious consequences from having unlimited freedom of speech and you are not encouraging serious discussion about solutions to them by belittling people. I think it's also worth considering the effect that the internet has on the flow of information in society. Our current situation is not the same as it is when the first amendment was written. I'm not saying we should get rid of it and institute a Ministry of Truth, but we shouldn't assume that the people who wrote it were infallible and any differences between today's society and society 300 years ago don't matter.
  • kristianc 9y ago
    Since the first amendment we've had 200+ years of nearly untrammeled progress. Before that, we in Europe had absolute monarchy and the divine right of Kings. Now sure, they might have been wrong, and they're weren't infallible, but if you're seeking to overturn that, you probably need something more compelling than 'the internet has increased the flow of information'. It was the increased flow of information with the printing press that brought about the Enlightenment in the first place.
    • wilsonnb 9y ago
      And if you are looking to defend it, you will probably need something more compelling than a correlation between prosperity and free speech. Anyways, I'm not seeking to overturn it. I said specifically in my comment "I'm not saying we should get rid of it". I just think we should be open to modifying any part of the Constitution. Many people refuse to consider this and think of parts of it as sacred doctrine. The first and second amendments, in particular.
      • wutbrodo 9y ago
        > Many people refuse to consider this and think of parts of it as sacred doctrine. The first and second amendments, in particular. I don't know that people are unwilling to _modify_ it, but rather to _violate_ it. I honestly personally would be pretty happy with no 2A, but unless the specific majorities required for an amendment agree with me, I'm strongly against violating it ad-hoc. The rule of law is simply a lot more important than any given policy.
• derefr 9y ago
  It's intriguing that this is exactly the reverse of the argument (complete with "we've learned a few things since then") that people make when discussing ICOs. The requirements for IPOs are important, they argue. Investor accreditation is important to prevent the naive masses from wasting their live-savings on snake-oil, they argue. "Please grow up and resist the urge" for unregulated securities, they argue. I think both arguments generalize, which makes the contrast interesting. Is the SEC, in its role in preventing equity sales to unaccredited investors, a "ministry of truth", censoring some companies from speaking to people who would want to transact with them? I would argue they're not, because they're not actually deciding who gets to sell equity. Anyone can sell equity—provided that party also discloses a whole bunch of information about itself. If it refuses to do that, then that party is restricted to only sell equity to people who are rich enough to not be risking much in an individual investment. I think this could be a workable model for regulating the news media (including Joe random blogger.) If you're publishing to the world, then you have to disclose all the research that went into your piece. If you're unwilling to do that, then the state could have a right to in turn restrict where you can publish.
  • icebraining 9y ago
    I think this could be a workable model for regulating the news media: you can publish whatever you like, as long as you disclose your entire fact-gathering process (i.e. "cite your sources") in a way where another journalist could do the same research and reach the same conclusions about what happened (i.e. "replicate your study".) Whelp, there goes whistleblowing. Or generally any source that prefers not to be named. I think your proposal destroys some of the most important journalism. Also, conclusions in journalism are not mathematical equations; they don't derive linearly from the facts. Who gets to decide whether that particular conclusion is or not supported by the facts?
    • derefr 9y ago
      > whistleblowing Keep in mind, I’m not suggesting that the source would need to be named; I’m only suggesting that the data from the source would need to be able to be independently recollected from the same source. In the example of a whistleblower, that would mean that the journalist would need to ensure that there was some secure anonymous route by which other journalists could get in contact with the same whistleblower to independently verify their story. You wouldn't have done your job, as a journalist, until you had provided a reproducible way for someone else to come along and re-do your investigation without you, ending up with all the same facts, if not the same beliefs. > Who gets to decide whether that particular conclusion is or not supported by the facts? My proposal would be to separate journalism from editorial or opinionated conclusions. "The news" itself would only contain objectively-verifiable facts, without opinions; and then it would be the job of magazines, talk-shows, etc. to “interpret” the news, in much the same way the current news media itself currently interprets things like scientific papers. In other words, “news” intended for the public would be trimmed down to the most boring and dry possible version of itself—like a cross between a wire service and a police scanner. Anything that wasn’t such, couldn’t legally be called “news”, nor could it suggest by its formatting that it is news. There would be a separation between "news" and "opinion" in about the same way there is an FDA-managed separation between "food" and "drugs"; and there would be public-awareness campaigns to make it clear that this division exists, and that any fact found in "opinion" sources that you haven't independently heard from a "news" source is suspect at best and more likely an active psy-op. But, again, the state wouldn't be responsible for declaring who can or cannot publish (just like the FDA isn't responsible for saying who can or cannot manufacture drugs; and the SEC isn't responsible for saying who can or cannot sell equity.) The only job of this hypothetical MiniTruth would be to say—according to a very objective, independently calculable bar, determined by Congress—whether what a given party is publishing can legally be called "news" or not; and to punish parties that do call their publications "news" if they have not met the requirements to do so. (Of course, there's no such thing as an unbiased source. The curated set of facts that end up put together into a news article is itself an editorial choice. But we already have a news media that generates every possible combination of such facts, so that bias, at least, sort of "evens out.")
• ngold 9y ago
  A well informed, educated citizenry has been the goal. Sadly it looks like a war on education has been waged by the right for decades now. Bush jr. revising bankruptcy law to permanently hobble those seeking an education before the drinking age has never been challenged. Instead college has sky rocketed and spending on public education has plummeted.
• simonsarris 9y ago
  >the citizenry is required to have a level of sophistication and erudition Conveniently 17th century colonial Massachusetts had that too! > the Puritans were a religious group that drew disproportionately from the most educated and education-obsessed parts of the English populace. Literacy among immigrants to Massachusetts was twice as high as the English average, and in an age when the vast majority of Europeans were farmers most immigrants to Massachusetts were skilled craftsmen or scholars. And the Puritan “homeland” of East Anglia was a an unusually intellectual place, with strong influences from Dutch and Continental trade; historian Havelock Ellis finds that it “accounts for a much larger proportion of literary, scientific, and intellectual achievement than any other part of England.” > Furthermore, only the best Puritans were allowed to go to Massachusetts; Fischer writes that “it may have been the only English colony that required some of its immigrants to submit letters of recommendation” and that “those who did not fit in were banished to other colonies and sent back to England”. Puritan “headhunters” went back to England to recruit “godly men” and “honest men” who “must not be of the poorer sort”. From: http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-see... Puritans were the original high-IQ eugenicists who wanted to go LARP in the woods. And they did.
  • rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
    That was an absolutely delightful read. Thank you so very much.
• dqpb 9y ago
  "Thankfully, we've learned a few things since then" I think "learning" might be a misleading analogy for how societies evolve... "evolve" is probably also a misleading analogy
• thaumaturgy 9y ago
  > The citizenry is required to have a level of sophistication and erudition and they will be forced to make nuanced and complicated judgements about the state of their world. This is a fantasy in good company with, "free markets will always sort everything out fairly", "we don't need governments or regulations, just property rights", "unrestricted gun ownership will make everyone safer", and "the solution to clickbait is for people to just start reading the articles." It depends on everyone suddenly becoming some kind of imagined ideal, just so that the world doesn't have to be so fuzzy and messy and can be reduced to simplistic mantras that any child can memorize. > It may help to read about twentieth century dictatorships and the history of modern, repressive regimes in general. It may also help to realize that the early 21st century has some issues that the early 20th century didn't. The power of business interests has now risen to compete on an equal footing with the largest governments, and in many cases is subverting or corrupting it. With so many people now being plugged in to some form of media or another, and so much of that media being controlled by a small number of powerful oligopolies, people are being influenced in ways that Hearst never could've imagined. I'm ambivalent about legislating media, but there are a few incontrovertible facts IMO: this is a new problem for society, it's a serious problem, and people aren't going to magically become resilient to it overnight. I think the people who are aghast at Trump sitting in the White House have already got some sense of the scope of this problem. For the people who are happy to see him there, I'd point out that a lot of leftists seriously floated the idea of Oprah running for president, and that only stopped because she wasn't interested. Imagine the amount of political influence she would have had through the media she controls, though. As is so often the case, probably all that's needed to get right-leaning people on board with tightening regulations on media is for the left to find their Trump.
• moorhosj 9y ago
  Should we get rid of places like CBC, BBC, NPR? Those are “government defined truth”, they are also highly respected journalists.
  • jeffdavis 9y ago
    There are legitimate concerns about that for the same reason as people would be concerned about government-funded churches. As long as people have many options the concerns are mostly theoretical, but still valid.
    • Chriky 9y ago
      The BBC is not government funded, and all television news in the UK, including Murdoch's Sky News is required by law to be unbiased. If it's a choice between the BBC and the constant, blatant, society distorting lies you see in American "News", I'll take my Orwellian dystopia thanks.
      • phaemon 9y ago
        They are only required to provide "balanced" coverage during an election, nothing more. The BBC is absolutely biased, as was made clear during the 2014 Scottish Independence referendum. The distortions and outright lies they continually produced were astonishing to me. You can see plenty examples of this at Wings Over Scotland (which I know is biased, but is also scrupulously accurate)
        • Chriky 9y ago
          https://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv-radio-and-on-demand/broadcast-codes/broadcast-code/section-five-due-impartiality-accuracy https://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv-radio-and-on-demand/broadcast-co... There's no mention here of the regulation only applying during elections - where are you getting that from? -- Can you link me to some of the lies from the BBC during the indyref?
          • 9y ago
• SubiculumCode 9y ago
  There may need to be some sort of compromise however if only this regard: We should not let hostile alien actors have free access to manipulate the political discourse. Edit: this compromise, to my mind, would not involve the government approving stories, but perhaps restricting internet connectivity to and from those hostile nations.
• s2g 9y ago
  We also know the cost of rapidly disseminated lies. Especially the effect those lies have on trust in mainstream news media (helps fox, hurts everyone else).
• ropeadopepope 9y ago
  > democratic minded people know how dangerous government defined truth (no matter how simple or well accepted) is. Have we? Take a look at the state of the press in Sweden. It's not much different from China these days. Without freedom of speech, there is no freedom of the press. America is the only country that guarantees either. Although, I will concede that our press isn't much better these days. There's a very real problem when every media outlet in the country is owned by just five companies.
  • pas 9y ago
    > Take a look at the state of the press in Sweden. Could you elaborate on that? I guess most people here have no idea of what's the problem there.
    • ropeadopepope 9y ago
      Sweden is undergoing a huge surge in violent crime, especially grenade attacks and rapes. The media can't report most of it because they're being perpetrated by migrants. Any media (social and mainstream) that's critical of migrants is being suppressed under threat of arrest under their hate speech laws. As a result, most of the people in Sweden are ignorant of the problem until they themselves become a victim.
• hedvig 9y ago
  I'm sure you also agree that corporate defined truth is equally as dangerous, right?
• raven105x 9y ago
  The bar isn't "too" high, it's somewhere in the 347th E8 lie algebra dimension high. We already live among "ministries of truth", they're just called science journals and studies. No matter how objective a field may seem to outsiders (mathematics, physics, astrology and life sciences), it is often plagued by dogma. The best people can do is pick their battles on what to educate themselves about, and even then the validity of information they find is often suspect. This is the natural outcome of living in the gap after the information explosion yet before fully autonomous verification.
• zo1 9y ago
  The problem is not one of definitions. The problem is that interpretation and ambiguity even comes into the picture. It should be just demonstrable facts, that no one can deny. We've gotten to a point where "questions" and "opinions" and "sources" are being transmitted and amplified to the masses, so of course we all worry about who gets to control that amplification force.
• jancsika 9y ago
  > There is a cost to this, of course - the citizenry is required to have a level of sophistication and erudition and they will be forced to make nuanced and complicated judgements about the state of their world. If we take a book from the 80s titled "How to Win at Chess" and try to update it for the 2010s, we have three choices: 1. Add the caveat: "Don't ever play against a computer." 2. Add an enormous chapter about how to use computers to play computer-aided chess which, if serious, would probably double the size of the book. 3. Assume that people smarter and more dedicated than the reader devote entire careers to making sure humans can play chess in an environment where it is difficult to cheat by using a computer. In laymen's terms: sophistication and erudition just won't cut it. You have three choices: 1. give people a well-lit place to read news that cannot be attacked through the internet. 2. at least double the amount of education people need in order for them to make judgments in a digital world. 3. Assume this is a problem that dedicated career people must solve to keep the population from being trivially manipulated in 100 different ways by 100 different actors when they attempt to read the news. Which are you advocating here?
  • lmm 9y ago
    In the '80s you would still meet better chess players than you. The techniques for playing against computers are much the same as those for playing against smarter humans. There are specific anti-computer strategies just as there were specific anti-Russian strategies, but they're equally minor.
    • jancsika 9y ago
      > In the '80s you would still meet better chess players than you. Sure. But in the 80s you'd never meet a player who is several orders of magnitude better than anyone who has ever lived. That's important. Similarly, in the 80s you'd never meet a group of political operatives who could read dossiers on tens or hundreds of thousands of people and tailor propaganda for them to read while in a doctor's waiting room, or wherever they happen to be. That's important. We can't beat supercomputers at chess by practicing chess really hard. And we can't beat digital propagandists by thinking harder about what they publish.
• jernfrost 9y ago
  Fake news is what got us dictatorships like Nazi Germany. Spreading lies about socialists and jews was how they gained votes. In fact the nazis did just like the fox and the trump crowd today and labeled all mainstream news fake. I don’t think you can dismiss the danger of such news environment. It plunged Germany into dictatorship. A too liberal democracy is vulnurable to totalitarians. We saw this in Egypt when anti-democratic muslim brotherhood gained power through elections.
  • fiblye 9y ago
    And controlled "truth" about the west is what keeps North Korea afloat. When people say that (insert liberty here) is what leads to Nazism, you're not making that liberty seem more dangerous. You're making Nazism seem less bad. >A too liberal democracy is vulnurable to totalitarians. We saw this in Egypt when anti-democratic muslim brotherhood gained power through elections. At no point in history has Egypt ever been accurately referred to as "a too liberal democracy". Hardline conservative/fundamentalist religious thought is a bigger source of the mess in Egypt than people having freedom.
• keiyakins 9y ago
  Can we at least require you not to call yourself 'whatever news' if you're not at least trying to present factual information?