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The question you pose is one which increasingly keeps me awake at night, and I'm deeply afraid that every solution is bad. In areas like, say, environmental po

The question you pose is one which increasingly keeps me awake at night, and I'm deeply afraid that every solution is bad. In areas like, say, environmental policy, we take it as a given that "individual people just need to do better" is a figleaf and a distraction from the real problem, that we'd only end up in disaster if we tried to base policy on it, and that coordinated action is the only thing that can truly fix the issue. But when it comes to the problem of "fake news", I can't think of any solution that doesn't resemble censorship or unaccountable arbitration of what counts as "real" information. And I don't want either. For a while, we were able to avoid this dilemma by pretending it didn't exist and that the marketplace of ideas would ensure that bad ideas would just sink out of existence, but it's getting harder to take that seriously: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/real-talk-about-fake-news https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/real-talk-about-fake-ne.... To me it's looking more and more like an unregulated marketplace of ideas ends up like any other unregulated marketplace: unfair and very dangerous. Meaning we will have to buckle down and face the hard choice of which is the greater evil, rather than pretending there's one good solution with no downsides.

lordCarbonFiber 8y ago
This is what happens when you drink the koolaid and buy into the idea that all restrictions on information is censorship. Ignoring the government (the only entity that can actually censor anything) we as private entities can and absolutely should be kicking these bad actors off our platforms and regulating them to the dust bins of history. It's not big brother that your should be scared of; it's the cult of the click. So long as companies are propped up by mindless ad spend fake news will exist and thrive; bad ideas literally pay for all of the startup trash that most of us work for. That's the bitter pill this industry needs to accept; instead of just siding with the fascists to preserve our brief moment of financial well being.
brightball 8y ago
The problem of fake news isn’t actual lies, it’s framing. You tell facts minus the details that would balance a story, so instead it’s weighted to the direction you want it to go. Everything you’ve said is still true and unless a reader/watcher/listener has knowledge of the full story already they have no idea what’s been left out. Anything from news to history to somebody’s biography is vulnerable to the approach and it’s virtually impossible to stop without some means of inserting all of the left out details into the content.
- justinjlynn 8y ago
  Modifying a story by purposefully editorialising the content in order to mislead the reader is effectively a lie of omission.
  - beobab 8y ago
    "I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth"?
  - Simon_says 8y ago
    It's not that simple. You can't communicate every true fact, so any reporting will necessarily require judgement of what's necessary to report. There is a fine gradient from unbiased reporting to lying by omission.
    - justinjlynn 8y ago
      The key distinction which makes the act a lie is the knowing and malicious manipulation of information in order to defraud the recipient of choice. That is, it is the deciet itself, and not merely the act of not conveying all known information, which is the anathema.
      - Simon_says 8y ago
        In practice, the people doing the reporting don't know how biased they are.
        dsfyu404ed 8y ago
        This. If three 18yos get shot committing a home invasion the SF headline will say "man shoots teenagers on front porch, police say charges will not be filed" and the BFE Arkansas headline will say "three men attempt home invasion, shot by homeowner". The same exact story will be spun totally differently (without lying or making absurd omissions) based on the author's personal beliefs. The authors don't even mean to spin the story and you won't ever get a group of people to agree what "impartial" is because personal beliefs will seep in.
jdietrich 8y ago
Britain is an interesting counterpoint. Our television news is regulated by a strict code of impartiality, because of the historically limited number of broadcasters (originally just the BBC, then a single commercial broadcaster, then a proliferation of commercial channels with the dawn of satellite broadcasting). Our cultural equivalent of Fox News is the Daily Mail newspaper, because the levels of partiality shown on Fox News would be contrary to our broadcasting regulations. The BBC has faced substantial criticism for interpreting the impartiality clause too literally - rather than representing the facts, they have a tendency to represent "both sides" of every debate, regardless of whether "both sides" are based in fact, have widespread support or are even sincerely held viewpoints. This has been particularly evident in coverage of science, where often the broad consensus of the scientific community and the views of a tiny handful of dissenters are given equal prominence. Such reports can be wholly impartial but extremely misleading. Even if you make the hard choice between an unregulated media and "censorship", you're still faced with a fractal structure of other, more granular hard choices. 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... https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/our_work/science_impartiality/science_impartiality.pdf https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/our_wo...
carry_bit 8y ago
> For a while, we were able to avoid this dilemma by pretending it didn't exist and that the marketplace of ideas would ensure that bad ideas would just sink out of existence, but it's getting harder to take that seriously Another possibility: it's working, but most people are wrong about which ideas are the bad ones.

lordCarbonFiber 8y ago

This is what happens when you drink the koolaid and buy into the idea that all restrictions on information is censorship. Ignoring the government (the only entity that can actually censor anything) we as private entities can and absolutely should be kicking these bad actors off our platforms and regulating them to the dust bins of history. It's not big brother that your should be scared of; it's the cult of the click. So long as companies are propped up by mindless ad spend fake news will exist and thrive; bad ideas literally pay for all of the startup trash that most of us work for. That's the bitter pill this industry needs to accept; instead of just siding with the fascists to preserve our brief moment of financial well being.

brightball 8y ago

The problem of fake news isn’t actual lies, it’s framing. You tell facts minus the details that would balance a story, so instead it’s weighted to the direction you want it to go. Everything you’ve said is still true and unless a reader/watcher/listener has knowledge of the full story already they have no idea what’s been left out. Anything from news to history to somebody’s biography is vulnerable to the approach and it’s virtually impossible to stop without some means of inserting all of the left out details into the content.

justinjlynn 8y ago
Modifying a story by purposefully editorialising the content in order to mislead the reader is effectively a lie of omission.
- beobab 8y ago
  "I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth"?
- Simon_says 8y ago
  It's not that simple. You can't communicate every true fact, so any reporting will necessarily require judgement of what's necessary to report. There is a fine gradient from unbiased reporting to lying by omission.
  - justinjlynn 8y ago
    The key distinction which makes the act a lie is the knowing and malicious manipulation of information in order to defraud the recipient of choice. That is, it is the deciet itself, and not merely the act of not conveying all known information, which is the anathema.
    - Simon_says 8y ago
      In practice, the people doing the reporting don't know how biased they are.
      - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
        This. If three 18yos get shot committing a home invasion the SF headline will say "man shoots teenagers on front porch, police say charges will not be filed" and the BFE Arkansas headline will say "three men attempt home invasion, shot by homeowner". The same exact story will be spun totally differently (without lying or making absurd omissions) based on the author's personal beliefs. The authors don't even mean to spin the story and you won't ever get a group of people to agree what "impartial" is because personal beliefs will seep in.

jdietrich 8y ago

Britain is an interesting counterpoint. Our television news is regulated by a strict code of impartiality, because of the historically limited number of broadcasters (originally just the BBC, then a single commercial broadcaster, then a proliferation of commercial channels with the dawn of satellite broadcasting). Our cultural equivalent of Fox News is the Daily Mail newspaper, because the levels of partiality shown on Fox News would be contrary to our broadcasting regulations. The BBC has faced substantial criticism for interpreting the impartiality clause too literally - rather than representing the facts, they have a tendency to represent "both sides" of every debate, regardless of whether "both sides" are based in fact, have widespread support or are even sincerely held viewpoints. This has been particularly evident in coverage of science, where often the broad consensus of the scientific community and the views of a tiny handful of dissenters are given equal prominence. Such reports can be wholly impartial but extremely misleading. Even if you make the hard choice between an unregulated media and "censorship", you're still faced with a fractal structure of other, more granular hard choices. 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... https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/our_work/science_impartiality/science_impartiality.pdf https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/our_wo...

carry_bit 8y ago

> For a while, we were able to avoid this dilemma by pretending it didn't exist and that the marketplace of ideas would ensure that bad ideas would just sink out of existence, but it's getting harder to take that seriously Another possibility: it's working, but most people are wrong about which ideas are the bad ones.