5 ms·

Calls for: Social media companies obliged to take down known sources of harmful content, including proven sources of disinformation It will be interestin

by dsl 8y ago

Calls for: Social media companies obliged to take down known sources of harmful content, including proven sources of disinformation It will be interesting to see how Reddit addresses The_Donald or 8chan deals with the QAnon nonsense in the wake of this. Edit: Feel free to disagree with the law, but you don't do that with a downvote.

sarcasmOrTears 8y ago
How do you prove something is disinformation? Time for a ministry of truth? I can imagine already imagine for example which version of the Convington kids case would be considered official and information.
- docdeek 8y ago
  This is exactly right. Trusting a government to determine what is true and what is not, and enforcing that version of truth via shutting down certain speech and penalising those who speak it, is a bad idea. I’ve no problem with a government announcing that they believe something is true or false, but I have a big problem with them restricting the speech of people who happen to disagree.
  - fzeroracer 8y ago
    Instead we have a ministry of truth being perpetuated by sites such as Youtube, with incredibly harmful information being disseminated and treated as truth resulting in disease outbreaks and outright denial of history. In your idealistic world of free speech, the innocent pay the price for the freedom to spread lies and deceit. At what point do we accept that it has to be fixed, or are we OK with diseases previously eradicated coming back in full force?
    - colordrops 8y ago
      The difference is that there is also an overwhelming force of true speech to counter the lies and deceit. Once you start banning speech, only "official" lies will be allowed. See China. Where the hell did you get the idea that free speech is only OK until people start to lie? You can take my free speech from my cold, dead mouth.
      - pjc50 8y ago
        We're in the era when automated propaganda means the lies can far more easily overwhelm the truth. And just as with guns, the lies end up with the deaths of innocent bystanders.
        colordrops 8y ago
        Whereas before, manual propaganda ended up with deaths of innocent bystanders. Can you point to any source that indicates that deaths have gone up due to AI/social media bots? And even if there was a study, it's not necessarily a case for censorship. Pretty much every basic right Americans have are trade-offs rather than 100% positive.
      - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
        > The difference is that there is also an overwhelming force of true speech to counter the lies and deceit That doesn't seem to be hugely helping as far as climate change goes. For anything where money is involved deepest pockets counts far more than the "overwhelming force" of true speech. It has become depressingly common to see topics being astroturfed or an "Independent Health Research Institute" set up by the guilty corporate or a trade body, and SEO'd and adworded to page 1. Like Soviet Bloc use of "democratic", use of "independent" in an information site has almost become proof it's not. :) We need to dream up some life changing consequences for lies and misinformation, serious enough that it stops being standard policy of every medium size enterprise.
      - fzeroracer 8y ago
        If that overwhelming force of true speech worked, then why hasn't climate change denial, anti-vaccine nonsense etc been eradicated from the public sphere yet? In fact, why are those movements growing?
        averros 8y ago
        That is because climate alarmism has been around for quite a while and anybody who has memory longer than a goldfish's can easily recollect the promised catastrophes which just didn't happen. Anti-vaccine nonsense is often painted as refusal to do all vaccines (there are nuts like that but they are few) rather than not exactly groundless suspicion that SOME new vaccines and aggressive vaccination regiments are pushed onto public not for the benefit of people but rather for the benefit of pharmas and because of evident willful misrepresentation of potential for dangerous side effects - not to mention that the very notion of forced medication strikes many people as utterly totalitarian. These movements are growing precisely because of persistent lying, exaggerations, and totalitarian inclinations of people who promote climate "change" (a good example of Orwellian newspeak, isn't it?) and ever-growing number of must-do vaccines as reason for more taxation and more corporate welfare. A normal human reaction to being forced to submit is to resist. Even if force is supposed to be for the victim's own good.
    - mikeq101101 8y ago
      Part of freedom is responsibility. If you want to be intellectually consistent, you would never trust MSM. They lied about every war, their body count is far far higher than that of some YouTube channels.
      - somebadguy 8y ago
        You really are a sad lonely incel. Fuck off.
    - docdeek 8y ago
      What happens when it goes further than people who encourage others not to vaccinate their kids or who spread the word about a flat Earth? If you decide to allow the government to determine what is truth and what is a lie, and then to punish those that speak something the government considers untruthful, you’re heading for a future that is far more dangerous than measles outbreaks and anti-scientific discourse. What happens when the government determines there is an official version of history and you can’t dispute that official version without punishment? What happens when the government decides that news reports should all align with an official ‘true version’ of current events, as determined by the government, of course?
      - fzeroracer 8y ago
        We're headed for a potentially disastrous future as a result of climate change being viewed as a hoax and old diseases being revived. I view the potential destruction of the human race as being far more dangerous than potentially some checks and balances on tech companies using 'faulty algorithms' as an excuse for why their content engines keep recommending conspiracy theories and false information to everyone. While the earth's climate ends up being permanently altered and forever affecting human habitation we'll still be arguing about how vaccines are turning the frogs gay.
    - raxxorrax 8y ago
      I would say at the point where free speech could believably proven to "hurt the innocent". If you denounce idealism in favor of some alleged pragmatism, I would need pragmatic evidence.
    - SuddsMcDuff 8y ago
      "In your idealistic world of free speech, the innocent pay the price for the freedom to spread lies and deceit." I'd replace 'innocent' with some combination of 'gullible', 'ignorant', or just 'stupid'. We have a tried & tested strategy for dealing with stupid people - it's called education.
      - pjc50 8y ago
        No, you're mischaracterising this. Gullible people believe the lies, but they're not necessarily the victims, they are more likely to be perpetrators. A lot of the nastier cases (e.g. Rwanda, Rohingya) the innocents are those murdered by the gullible.
  - nightfly 8y ago
    Especially in an era where our president refers to every negative article about him as "fake news".
  - CM30 8y ago
    Especially as you have no idea when a government hostile to you or your beliefs may take power, and if they do, well then it could means news and things you believe in get censored or banned. Anyone who believes governments should have the ability to decide what 'fake news' is should remember who's in the White House about now, or who runs the FCC at the moment. And who might be in the White House in a few years/run the FCC in a few years, etc.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Court cases? Ultimately that's where Sandy Hook has ended up. More seriously, if you believe that it's impossible for courts to establish truth or that they are the same thing as Party members of the elected government, you've already given up on the possibility of rule of law and arguably democracy as a whole.
  - A2017U1 8y ago
    Can I take the dozens of news outlets in the Western world to court for lying about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction? It was their coverage which arguably resulted in public support with billions of tax dollars spent on a lie Or were they simply reporting what they were told without proof? It's a very slippery slope.
    - pjc50 8y ago
      I think any effective, honest campaign against lying in public life has to take both newspapers and politicians into account somehow. UK press regulation is absent but at the same time we have onerous libel law. Having "accurately reporting what the government minister said" still open press to liability is .. interesting, especially when considering how to report Trump.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > Can I take the dozens of news outlets in the Western world to court for lying about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction? Which specific ones?
    - creato 8y ago
      > Can I take the dozens of news outlets in the Western world to court for lying about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction? It was their coverage which arguably resulted in public support with billions of tax dollars spent on a lie The "dozens of news outlets" were not, as far as they knew, lying. They were reporting what their sources, many/most of them public, told them. If you want to punish someone for this lie, it should be the Bush administration.
  - AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
- abainbridge 8y ago
  The report recommends, "tech companies assume legal liability for content identified as harmful after it has been posted by users". If they do that, the existing laws and court system would be used decide what is disinformation, in the same they are currently applied to traditionally published media.
  - beaner 8y ago
    If this were being applied to the media, where the links come from, we wouldn't need to apply it to tech sites, where the links are shared. This doesn't cover all cases but it's offloading the responsibility from "journalists" to tech. If the media were honest at all they'd acknowledge that they're most of the problem.
  - AstralStorm 8y ago
    And then everything is frozen. No discourse allowed because moderators become the police and they cannot accept any liability. This law cannot be allowed to pass in such a broad form. Obviously it is convenient to status quo.
res0nat0r 8y ago
Reddit-wise I doubt nothing honestly. That subreddit has been a hateful cesspool for years now, but the community and the money/traffic it bring in for the site due to the sheer amount of traffic, and backlash from big name rightwing nutters that use it for their propaganda launchpoint is more than reddit management wants to deal with, thus it's not going anywhere.
mikeq101101 8y ago
Who decides what is a "proven source of disinformation"? The media that are currently paraded as trustworthy were all in on things like "babies out of incubators", "weapons of mass destruction", Libya, etc. And everyone who tried to go against them was smeared as conspiracy theorist. I can not trust the media that was integral in lying about and manufacturing consent for endless wars, when they have not learned from their mistakes and are still beating their drums. Giving the elites power to decide what is a "proven source of disinformation" sounds like a really bad idea.
- lisper 8y ago
  > Who decides what is a "proven source of disinformation"? That question doesn't get nearly enough attention among those decrying the rise of fake news. Even the NYT occasionally gets it wrong. Does that make them a "proven source of disinformation"? The answer is not to throw your hands in the air and concede to factual relativism. But the first step to solving this problem is to recognize that it is a very, very difficult problem.
  - asdff 8y ago
    It is not a difficult problem, ban the bots from St. Petersburg, not the god damn NYT.
    - lisper 8y ago
      What you are effectively saying is that the answer to "who decides" is you. I can see why you would think that is a satisfactory answer, but can you see how a reasonable person might disagree?
      - Retra 8y ago
        If reasonable people are disagreeing, then they have reasons to disagree. If reasons can drive a discussion, they can decide issues like this. So your question is misleading. It's not "who decides", but "what decides", and how to we ensure the "what" remains reasons that reasonable people would support. Otherwise, you're just asking how people make decisions. "Who decided murder should be illegal" is just a poor (rather conspiratorial) way to ask what reasons are used to argue that it should be illegal and how we determined that those reasons were sufficient. Presumably, in a democracy, the answer to "who determines what the government does" is "the people."
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Pimpus 8y ago
While the rest of Reddit was lying about Hillary's favorability, only The Donald was posting accurate polls. They've continued to be more accurate than the other subreddits, most recently with the Jussie Smolett thing. I think at this point people are willfully ignoring reality, though it's getting harder (the Russia collusion conspiracy theory is no longer cresible).
- somebadguy 8y ago
  Aww you poor stupid asshole. Why didn’t your mother follow her gut and have you aborted?
- caconym_ 8y ago
  r/T_D is completely fucking unhinged. The most memorable thing I saw there was a spree of posts explicitly praising Pinochet for the atrocities he committed, and calling for the same treatment for their political enemies; this stuff was upvoted to the top of the subreddit. I do not disagree that there is misinformation and biased content everywhere, but if you're turning to r/T_D as a general source of truths, you should take a step back.
  - beaner 8y ago
    For every piece of fake news in the_donald, it legitimately calls out five examples from liberal sources. It's a combination of meme factory and watchdog group. It's a little crazy because it has to be. When you can't speak about your views reasonably and publicly because you'll be ostracised no matter what you say or how accurate it is, what else can you do? How else do you respond? The maga DC kid literally just stood there and was called a racist and bigot with calls for his face to be punched in and for him to be doxxed. Imagine if he opened his mouth to say something? That's the world people in the_donald live in. Fear to speak. And that story turned out to be fake news anyway. For people using it, the_donald played an important role of being a place where much of the truth of that situation was surfaced. I don't think you can really blame people for saying fuck it, if nobody's going to hear me out, I may as well be fun and funny and extreme while I do it. Plus, everybody knows that the real danger isn't that it promotes a lot of fake news, but that the real news that it does surface might be convincing. Between the memes, the_donald is part of a well-rounded news feed if your goal is to actually understand US politics and the viewpoints of many conservative thinkers, and not just blindly desire people to conform to something else. It obviously should not be your only news source.

by dsl 8y ago

sarcasmOrTears 8y ago

How do you prove something is disinformation? Time for a ministry of truth? I can imagine already imagine for example which version of the Convington kids case would be considered official and information.

docdeek 8y ago
This is exactly right. Trusting a government to determine what is true and what is not, and enforcing that version of truth via shutting down certain speech and penalising those who speak it, is a bad idea. I’ve no problem with a government announcing that they believe something is true or false, but I have a big problem with them restricting the speech of people who happen to disagree.
- fzeroracer 8y ago
  Instead we have a ministry of truth being perpetuated by sites such as Youtube, with incredibly harmful information being disseminated and treated as truth resulting in disease outbreaks and outright denial of history. In your idealistic world of free speech, the innocent pay the price for the freedom to spread lies and deceit. At what point do we accept that it has to be fixed, or are we OK with diseases previously eradicated coming back in full force?
  - colordrops 8y ago
    The difference is that there is also an overwhelming force of true speech to counter the lies and deceit. Once you start banning speech, only "official" lies will be allowed. See China. Where the hell did you get the idea that free speech is only OK until people start to lie? You can take my free speech from my cold, dead mouth.
    - pjc50 8y ago
      We're in the era when automated propaganda means the lies can far more easily overwhelm the truth. And just as with guns, the lies end up with the deaths of innocent bystanders.
      - colordrops 8y ago
        Whereas before, manual propaganda ended up with deaths of innocent bystanders. Can you point to any source that indicates that deaths have gone up due to AI/social media bots? And even if there was a study, it's not necessarily a case for censorship. Pretty much every basic right Americans have are trade-offs rather than 100% positive.
    - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
      > The difference is that there is also an overwhelming force of true speech to counter the lies and deceit That doesn't seem to be hugely helping as far as climate change goes. For anything where money is involved deepest pockets counts far more than the "overwhelming force" of true speech. It has become depressingly common to see topics being astroturfed or an "Independent Health Research Institute" set up by the guilty corporate or a trade body, and SEO'd and adworded to page 1. Like Soviet Bloc use of "democratic", use of "independent" in an information site has almost become proof it's not. :) We need to dream up some life changing consequences for lies and misinformation, serious enough that it stops being standard policy of every medium size enterprise.
    - fzeroracer 8y ago
      If that overwhelming force of true speech worked, then why hasn't climate change denial, anti-vaccine nonsense etc been eradicated from the public sphere yet? In fact, why are those movements growing?
      - averros 8y ago
        That is because climate alarmism has been around for quite a while and anybody who has memory longer than a goldfish's can easily recollect the promised catastrophes which just didn't happen. Anti-vaccine nonsense is often painted as refusal to do all vaccines (there are nuts like that but they are few) rather than not exactly groundless suspicion that SOME new vaccines and aggressive vaccination regiments are pushed onto public not for the benefit of people but rather for the benefit of pharmas and because of evident willful misrepresentation of potential for dangerous side effects - not to mention that the very notion of forced medication strikes many people as utterly totalitarian. These movements are growing precisely because of persistent lying, exaggerations, and totalitarian inclinations of people who promote climate "change" (a good example of Orwellian newspeak, isn't it?) and ever-growing number of must-do vaccines as reason for more taxation and more corporate welfare. A normal human reaction to being forced to submit is to resist. Even if force is supposed to be for the victim's own good.
  - mikeq101101 8y ago
    Part of freedom is responsibility. If you want to be intellectually consistent, you would never trust MSM. They lied about every war, their body count is far far higher than that of some YouTube channels.
    - somebadguy 8y ago
      You really are a sad lonely incel. Fuck off.
  - docdeek 8y ago
    What happens when it goes further than people who encourage others not to vaccinate their kids or who spread the word about a flat Earth? If you decide to allow the government to determine what is truth and what is a lie, and then to punish those that speak something the government considers untruthful, you’re heading for a future that is far more dangerous than measles outbreaks and anti-scientific discourse. What happens when the government determines there is an official version of history and you can’t dispute that official version without punishment? What happens when the government decides that news reports should all align with an official ‘true version’ of current events, as determined by the government, of course?
    - fzeroracer 8y ago
      We're headed for a potentially disastrous future as a result of climate change being viewed as a hoax and old diseases being revived. I view the potential destruction of the human race as being far more dangerous than potentially some checks and balances on tech companies using 'faulty algorithms' as an excuse for why their content engines keep recommending conspiracy theories and false information to everyone. While the earth's climate ends up being permanently altered and forever affecting human habitation we'll still be arguing about how vaccines are turning the frogs gay.
  - raxxorrax 8y ago
    I would say at the point where free speech could believably proven to "hurt the innocent". If you denounce idealism in favor of some alleged pragmatism, I would need pragmatic evidence.
  - SuddsMcDuff 8y ago
    "In your idealistic world of free speech, the innocent pay the price for the freedom to spread lies and deceit." I'd replace 'innocent' with some combination of 'gullible', 'ignorant', or just 'stupid'. We have a tried & tested strategy for dealing with stupid people - it's called education.
    - pjc50 8y ago
      No, you're mischaracterising this. Gullible people believe the lies, but they're not necessarily the victims, they are more likely to be perpetrators. A lot of the nastier cases (e.g. Rwanda, Rohingya) the innocents are those murdered by the gullible.
- nightfly 8y ago
  Especially in an era where our president refers to every negative article about him as "fake news".
- CM30 8y ago
  Especially as you have no idea when a government hostile to you or your beliefs may take power, and if they do, well then it could means news and things you believe in get censored or banned. Anyone who believes governments should have the ability to decide what 'fake news' is should remember who's in the White House about now, or who runs the FCC at the moment. And who might be in the White House in a few years/run the FCC in a few years, etc.
pjc50 8y ago
Court cases? Ultimately that's where Sandy Hook has ended up. More seriously, if you believe that it's impossible for courts to establish truth or that they are the same thing as Party members of the elected government, you've already given up on the possibility of rule of law and arguably democracy as a whole.
- A2017U1 8y ago
  Can I take the dozens of news outlets in the Western world to court for lying about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction? It was their coverage which arguably resulted in public support with billions of tax dollars spent on a lie Or were they simply reporting what they were told without proof? It's a very slippery slope.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    I think any effective, honest campaign against lying in public life has to take both newspapers and politicians into account somehow. UK press regulation is absent but at the same time we have onerous libel law. Having "accurately reporting what the government minister said" still open press to liability is .. interesting, especially when considering how to report Trump.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Can I take the dozens of news outlets in the Western world to court for lying about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction? Which specific ones?
  - creato 8y ago
    > Can I take the dozens of news outlets in the Western world to court for lying about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction? It was their coverage which arguably resulted in public support with billions of tax dollars spent on a lie The "dozens of news outlets" were not, as far as they knew, lying. They were reporting what their sources, many/most of them public, told them. If you want to punish someone for this lie, it should be the Bush administration.
- AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
abainbridge 8y ago
The report recommends, "tech companies assume legal liability for content identified as harmful after it has been posted by users". If they do that, the existing laws and court system would be used decide what is disinformation, in the same they are currently applied to traditionally published media.
- beaner 8y ago
  If this were being applied to the media, where the links come from, we wouldn't need to apply it to tech sites, where the links are shared. This doesn't cover all cases but it's offloading the responsibility from "journalists" to tech. If the media were honest at all they'd acknowledge that they're most of the problem.
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  And then everything is frozen. No discourse allowed because moderators become the police and they cannot accept any liability. This law cannot be allowed to pass in such a broad form. Obviously it is convenient to status quo.

res0nat0r 8y ago

Reddit-wise I doubt nothing honestly. That subreddit has been a hateful cesspool for years now, but the community and the money/traffic it bring in for the site due to the sheer amount of traffic, and backlash from big name rightwing nutters that use it for their propaganda launchpoint is more than reddit management wants to deal with, thus it's not going anywhere.

mikeq101101 8y ago

Who decides what is a "proven source of disinformation"? The media that are currently paraded as trustworthy were all in on things like "babies out of incubators", "weapons of mass destruction", Libya, etc. And everyone who tried to go against them was smeared as conspiracy theorist. I can not trust the media that was integral in lying about and manufacturing consent for endless wars, when they have not learned from their mistakes and are still beating their drums. Giving the elites power to decide what is a "proven source of disinformation" sounds like a really bad idea.

lisper 8y ago
> Who decides what is a "proven source of disinformation"? That question doesn't get nearly enough attention among those decrying the rise of fake news. Even the NYT occasionally gets it wrong. Does that make them a "proven source of disinformation"? The answer is not to throw your hands in the air and concede to factual relativism. But the first step to solving this problem is to recognize that it is a very, very difficult problem.
- asdff 8y ago
  It is not a difficult problem, ban the bots from St. Petersburg, not the god damn NYT.
  - lisper 8y ago
    What you are effectively saying is that the answer to "who decides" is you. I can see why you would think that is a satisfactory answer, but can you see how a reasonable person might disagree?
    - Retra 8y ago
      If reasonable people are disagreeing, then they have reasons to disagree. If reasons can drive a discussion, they can decide issues like this. So your question is misleading. It's not "who decides", but "what decides", and how to we ensure the "what" remains reasons that reasonable people would support. Otherwise, you're just asking how people make decisions. "Who decided murder should be illegal" is just a poor (rather conspiratorial) way to ask what reasons are used to argue that it should be illegal and how we determined that those reasons were sufficient. Presumably, in a democracy, the answer to "who determines what the government does" is "the people."

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Pimpus 8y ago

While the rest of Reddit was lying about Hillary's favorability, only The Donald was posting accurate polls. They've continued to be more accurate than the other subreddits, most recently with the Jussie Smolett thing. I think at this point people are willfully ignoring reality, though it's getting harder (the Russia collusion conspiracy theory is no longer cresible).

somebadguy 8y ago
Aww you poor stupid asshole. Why didn’t your mother follow her gut and have you aborted?
caconym_ 8y ago
r/T_D is completely fucking unhinged. The most memorable thing I saw there was a spree of posts explicitly praising Pinochet for the atrocities he committed, and calling for the same treatment for their political enemies; this stuff was upvoted to the top of the subreddit. I do not disagree that there is misinformation and biased content everywhere, but if you're turning to r/T_D as a general source of truths, you should take a step back.
- beaner 8y ago
  For every piece of fake news in the_donald, it legitimately calls out five examples from liberal sources. It's a combination of meme factory and watchdog group. It's a little crazy because it has to be. When you can't speak about your views reasonably and publicly because you'll be ostracised no matter what you say or how accurate it is, what else can you do? How else do you respond? The maga DC kid literally just stood there and was called a racist and bigot with calls for his face to be punched in and for him to be doxxed. Imagine if he opened his mouth to say something? That's the world people in the_donald live in. Fear to speak. And that story turned out to be fake news anyway. For people using it, the_donald played an important role of being a place where much of the truth of that situation was surfaced. I don't think you can really blame people for saying fuck it, if nobody's going to hear me out, I may as well be fun and funny and extreme while I do it. Plus, everybody knows that the real danger isn't that it promotes a lot of fake news, but that the real news that it does surface might be convincing. Between the memes, the_donald is part of a well-rounded news feed if your goal is to actually understand US politics and the viewpoints of many conservative thinkers, and not just blindly desire people to conform to something else. It obviously should not be your only news source.