7 ms·

Laws against lies: Asian governments are trying to curb fake news

40 points by ValentineC 8y ago

monksy 8y ago
Given most Asian governments' preference for strict and harsh governance this is very concerning.
- dman 8y ago
  Think some of the concerns are pretty legitimate. Social Media has been used to coordinate mob violence in multiple Asian countries. How people use social media in different countries is very different.
  - ralusek 8y ago
    Language has also been used to coordinate mob violence. So have arms and legs. Public roads have helped in the coordination of violence and human trafficking, and it's time to take roads seriously. Violence is illegal, not the potential pathways.
    - bilbo0s 8y ago
      I think what you are saying is true for the US, but if you travel, don't make the mistake of thinking our laws follow you everywhere. Whenever I am in different nations, especially the nations I know have strict laws, such as Cuba, I always leave the idea of the Constitution at the customs desk. You're under their laws. What is legal or illegal, is whatever they say is legal or illegal. So don't travel the world thinking that what you just stated is true. Potential pathways to violence may, indeed, be illegal in the nation to which you are traveling. And punishments can be harsh. They can, will, and have sentenced people to death for being caught with drugs for instance. No murder. No guns. No violence. No nothing. Just caught with drugs -> death. I always strongly urge people, especially young people, to be aware of the legal environment in any nation to which they are traveling.
      - monksy 8y ago
        > So don't travel the world thinking that what you just stated is true. Potential pathways to violence may, indeed, be illegal in the nation to which you are traveling. And punishments can be harsh. They can, will, and have sentenced people to death for being caught with drugs for instance. No murder. No guns. No violence. No nothing. Just caught with drugs -> death. >I always strongly urge people, especially young people, to be aware of the legal environment in any nation to which they are traveling. Absolutely. Being caught in the Dubai airport while connecting with drugs. You'll be faced with the consequences of the drug laws of the UAE without being techincally in the country. (Also you can be detained there for violating the laws of the UAE while connecting as well) Also in Thailand, never step on the currency because it's a disrespect to the king (who is on their money). Other countries act very differently. It's amazing when people go elsewhere and think "well it's legal back at home" (also the opposite is dumbfounding.. South Korea tries to punish people who smoke weed in canada if the people come back after smoking)
    - tathougies 8y ago
      > Violence is illegal, not the potential pathways. Finally someone with sense on hacker news!
    - laughinghan 8y ago
      Is it your belief that there has never been any good public policy other than laws criminalizing violence that have ever had any positive effects on how much violence occurs?
      - ralusek 8y ago
        I think that there are all sorts of measures you could take to minimize or maximize a single variable. If you want to minimize violence, you could install cameras in every room. Unverifiable rape claims would virtually disappear. Unresolved murders, too. GPS trackers on everyone? Same thing, and we already basically do that one. If your imagination can't provide you with dangerous scenarios arising from the state controlling what is true, history and fiction would be glad to assist you.
        laughinghan 8y ago
        Ah yes, bad, awful, terrible policies to reduce violence abound. But do you believe there have never been any good public policies balancing public safety against other rights, that you agree with? For example, there are legal restrictions on how much people who work on our nuclear weapons can say about them. This is clearly a restriction of their fundamental human right to freedom of speech. Is it worth it?
  - voxic11 8y ago
    Has that actually happened in Singapore though? I usually read about those kinds of incidents in rural communities which are recently and rapidly becoming internet connected. Not in densely populated and highly educated city-states which have been highly connected for decades. Also this makes it sound like Singapore is less worried about mobs and more about cultural values > K. Shanmugam, the law minister, warned lawmakers of the dangers of unregulated speech, handing them a list of “offensive song lyrics”, which included hits by Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande.
    - notahacker 8y ago
      Densely populated cities filled with mostly educated people are perfectly capable of riots driven by ethnic tensions and dubious claims, but Singapore's last race riot was in 1969[1]. Singapore had legitimate concerns about racial tensions in the 1970s and some of its more illiberal policies were arguably practical responses to those situations, but that was a long time ago when Singaporean society was very different, and this draft policy's clauses about making it illegal to publish material that "might diminish public confidence in a state body" seems to have other priorities. [1]There was another riot involving Indian construction workers in 2013, but that was a spontaneous [massive over]reaction to a bus driver running someone over, not something planned or stirred up beforehand. And that's every riot in Singapore since 1969...
    - neokantian 8y ago
      I suppose that mentioning Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande is just a ploy to enlist trad-con support for the bill. The real reason is that government power very much depends on controlling the official narrative while making sure that alternative ones do not gain much traction. This was so much easier to do when information was primarily distributed through centralized media, such as newspapers, radio, and television. Governments simply had much more power back then. The internet has eroded it. So, either they give up some of that excess power, or else they somehow manage to centralize the internet. The societal control that we inherited from the past is no longer compatible with decentralized distribution of information on the internet. The very fact that we are interactively discussing this topic today, instead of merely swallowing what is supposedly best for us, demonstrates the point actually quite nicely.
- poptrex 8y ago
  That's a pretty broad generalisation over a lot of countries that constitute Asia. Japan and Korea for example are consistently ranked above many west european countries in terms of freedom [1]. And many asian countries are at about the middle in these rankings. [1] https://www.cato.org/human-freedom-index-new https://www.cato.org/human-freedom-index-new
  - darkpuma 8y ago
    Japan and Korea being highly developed nations with with capital punishment, unlike the developed nations of Europe, seems to support his point. Those were your counter-examples, probably because next to Singapore they look moderate, but they're not even good counter-examples. In 2014, 80% of adults in Japan supported capital punishment, making it far more popular in Japan than it is even in America: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/12/28/national/crime-legal/number-inmates-awaiting-death-penalty-japan-end-2017-expected-123/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/12/28/national/crime-...
    - poptrex 8y ago
      I'm not sure how capital punishment is relevant, but the US also has capital punishment, in spite of being "developed" and ranking high on the index. And the number of people actually being executed in the US is much higher than Japan or Korea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment#Capital_punishment_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment#Capital_pun...
      - darkpuma 8y ago
        Everyone here knows America has the death penalty. That's probably a big part of why you compared Japan to "western european countries" rather than America. Saying that a country has saner law and order than America is considered damning with faint praise. To reiterate: America executes more people than Japan, but in Japan execution is far more popular than in America. In America, capital punishment is very controversial, but in Japan it enjoys broad public support. To the original point, per wikipedia: >"Of the countries/regions categorized as 'very high' on the Human Development Index, 10 countries perform capital punishment: the United States, Japan, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Belarus, Oman, and Taiwan" Of those, one is in North America, one in Eastern Europe, five in the Middle East, and three in Asia. It strains credibility to suggest that Asia, moreso than Western Europe, is known for a progressive justice system. > "I'm not sure how capital punishment is relevant" Because the matter being discussed is "most Asian governments' preference for strict and harsh governance."
coldcode 8y ago
Unless there is some precise definition of fake news, this is just censorship in sheep's clothing.
- rhacker 8y ago
  Exactly. About 2 years ago Etsy started banning everyone that was selling crystals and also included "promotes good health or luck" And while that's probably fine to do from a trades perspective, I don't like the notion that we had to start leaning this way. If we keep leaning over at what point are we going to make it illegal to believe in UFOs (as in aliens) and ghosts. There's no scientific evidence to make those concepts not possible. Just evidence to make things we understand possible. And on top of that, we have some kind of fucked up exception for God. Even scientists are just unwilling to go on a rant to disprove god, but totally happy putting someone in the psych ward for believing in aliens kidnapping them. (im not talking about ALL scientists - of course you'll find them, but talking about bulk percentages here) Thought police are coming.
  - katbyte 8y ago
    I think a line needs to be drawn. Those are sort of wacko ideas hard to disprove, but saying "hillary clinton is guilty of ____" or blatantly misrepresenting facts or lieing? that needs to stop.
    - atypicaluser 8y ago
      Who draws the line?
      - cannonedhamster 8y ago
        That would be the courts. Since libel/slander/defamation is already against the law. It's rather different from being misinformed and retracting the content and doubling down on lying because it's politically expedient. At least it was before this Presidency in the United States. I'm not sure how a purveyor of conspiracy theories being the ultimate enforcer of the law changes that, if at all.
robgibbons 8y ago
Souds more like they want a monopoly on propaganda.
Palptine 8y ago
Who fact checks the fact checkers?
- ashelmire 8y ago
  Interesting idea - are you more likely to be lied to in a) an authoritarian state with laws against fake news b) a democratic state with laws against fake news, or c) a democratic state without laws against fake news?
  - partiallypro 8y ago
    What's democratic about outlawing speech?
    - laughinghan 8y ago
      "Democracy is a system of government where the citizens exercise power by voting." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy If the citizens or elected representatives in a democracy voted to start censoring speech, but continued to empower citizens to vote, it would still be a democratic state in spite of the censorship. An illiberal one, but still democratic.
      - dexen 8y ago
        >it would still be a democratic state Only through the first election cycle [1]. Your idea is valid in a static, nothing-ever-changes world, with no significant political dynamics to speak of. However, out in the world as we know it, political processes run all the time, the proverbial pendulum swings, and consensus is formed via vocal advocacy and protests. Right now we have four basic things defined as "political speech": person-to-person conversations; mass communication (press, TV, radio, online videos); peaceful physical actions like assembly and manifestations; and finally donations to candidates, parties and PACs. We protect each and every recognized form of "political speech" exactly because without it the important changes could not happen. In a world with limited communication, you'd have on one side a small ruling clique, semi detached from daily concerns, a large mass of disenfranchised and zoned out people coasting along in the middle, and on the other side you'd have a small fraction of disenfranchised and either abused or outright persecuted people that can't even raise the wider society's awareness. This is an unstable state, leading to societal collapse in one way or another. Let people speak effectively, lest they could not protest problems or oppression. Let people speak effectively, lest the wider society couldn't even learn of the problems faced by sub-groups. Being heard is the first, necessary step to having wants and grievances addressed. -- [1] tiptoeing around Godwin's law
jeffdavis 8y ago
One thing has been increasingly clear over the last few years: a lot of people are basically OK giving large governments more power and relinquishing what I think of as basic rights. Not just overseas, but here in the US a lot of people just don't care about rights and think the government is the solution to everything if you just give them enough power. Not sure how to keep rights, honestly. The Constitution and the courts help, but only for so long. The only thing I can think of is that it could work in a poorer country (or at least relatively poorer) because people would self-select to be there for the freedom, and people who don't care bout freedom would follow money somewhere else.
- whoevercares 8y ago
  They are evil but sadly they do deliver results and are right a lot so far. (Sorry to quote amazon LP) On the other hand, for some reason democratic negotiations become harder with no parties willing to make trade-offs
- deytempo 8y ago
  The countries without money wouldn’t have the power to keep the other countries from taking their freedom
- CharlesColeman 8y ago
  > Not just overseas, but here in the US a lot of people just don't care about rights and think the government is the solution to everything if you just give them enough power. I think claiming that people "don't care about rights" is being at least a little uncharitable. Things like fake news and disinformation are real problems, but citizens have ceded so much power to ever larger corporations; and those corporations have taken an ever more skeptical eye to the public good (in favor of focusing on shareholder value); that the only practical solutions to many problems may involve the intervention of a government. If you care about your rights, you really ought to want to break-up corporations like Facebook into little-bits, which would then make many of these problems more tractable to being solvable by collective action than government intervention.
  - 8y ago
qroshan 8y ago
Fake News is a problem. without removing the basic freedom of speech, here is a law that'll curb it. When posting on Social Media, you must use a) Verified Name with a Verified Pic or b) Reusable anonymous ID like anonymous-323876 (Generic face profile for all anonymous users). or c) Fully Anonymous like anonymous with a common,generic face profile Sites can only use PII for verification, but must discard everything related to user and cannot tie PII UserID to any logs
- laughinghan 8y ago
  What leads you to believe the people spreading fake news on WhatsApp and Facebook, leading to death and violence, aren't already real people using their real names? In articles like https://www.wired.com/story/how-whatsapp-fuels-fake-news-and-violence-in-india/ https://www.wired.com/story/how-whatsapp-fuels-fake-news-and... there's no mention of anonymous, fake, or untraceable accounts, just real people being outraged and sharing misleading, sensationalized, or outright fake news, ultimately leading to tragedy. Not to mention, your proposal is barely different from what Facebook already does.
- tathougies 8y ago
  How is requiring someone to use a particular form of identification not also a violation of free speech.

40 points by ValentineC 8y ago

monksy 8y ago

Given most Asian governments' preference for strict and harsh governance this is very concerning.

dman 8y ago
Think some of the concerns are pretty legitimate. Social Media has been used to coordinate mob violence in multiple Asian countries. How people use social media in different countries is very different.
- ralusek 8y ago
  Language has also been used to coordinate mob violence. So have arms and legs. Public roads have helped in the coordination of violence and human trafficking, and it's time to take roads seriously. Violence is illegal, not the potential pathways.
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    I think what you are saying is true for the US, but if you travel, don't make the mistake of thinking our laws follow you everywhere. Whenever I am in different nations, especially the nations I know have strict laws, such as Cuba, I always leave the idea of the Constitution at the customs desk. You're under their laws. What is legal or illegal, is whatever they say is legal or illegal. So don't travel the world thinking that what you just stated is true. Potential pathways to violence may, indeed, be illegal in the nation to which you are traveling. And punishments can be harsh. They can, will, and have sentenced people to death for being caught with drugs for instance. No murder. No guns. No violence. No nothing. Just caught with drugs -> death. I always strongly urge people, especially young people, to be aware of the legal environment in any nation to which they are traveling.
    - monksy 8y ago
      > So don't travel the world thinking that what you just stated is true. Potential pathways to violence may, indeed, be illegal in the nation to which you are traveling. And punishments can be harsh. They can, will, and have sentenced people to death for being caught with drugs for instance. No murder. No guns. No violence. No nothing. Just caught with drugs -> death. >I always strongly urge people, especially young people, to be aware of the legal environment in any nation to which they are traveling. Absolutely. Being caught in the Dubai airport while connecting with drugs. You'll be faced with the consequences of the drug laws of the UAE without being techincally in the country. (Also you can be detained there for violating the laws of the UAE while connecting as well) Also in Thailand, never step on the currency because it's a disrespect to the king (who is on their money). Other countries act very differently. It's amazing when people go elsewhere and think "well it's legal back at home" (also the opposite is dumbfounding.. South Korea tries to punish people who smoke weed in canada if the people come back after smoking)
  - tathougies 8y ago
    > Violence is illegal, not the potential pathways. Finally someone with sense on hacker news!
  - laughinghan 8y ago
    Is it your belief that there has never been any good public policy other than laws criminalizing violence that have ever had any positive effects on how much violence occurs?
    - ralusek 8y ago
      I think that there are all sorts of measures you could take to minimize or maximize a single variable. If you want to minimize violence, you could install cameras in every room. Unverifiable rape claims would virtually disappear. Unresolved murders, too. GPS trackers on everyone? Same thing, and we already basically do that one. If your imagination can't provide you with dangerous scenarios arising from the state controlling what is true, history and fiction would be glad to assist you.
      - laughinghan 8y ago
        Ah yes, bad, awful, terrible policies to reduce violence abound. But do you believe there have never been any good public policies balancing public safety against other rights, that you agree with? For example, there are legal restrictions on how much people who work on our nuclear weapons can say about them. This is clearly a restriction of their fundamental human right to freedom of speech. Is it worth it?
- voxic11 8y ago
  Has that actually happened in Singapore though? I usually read about those kinds of incidents in rural communities which are recently and rapidly becoming internet connected. Not in densely populated and highly educated city-states which have been highly connected for decades. Also this makes it sound like Singapore is less worried about mobs and more about cultural values > K. Shanmugam, the law minister, warned lawmakers of the dangers of unregulated speech, handing them a list of “offensive song lyrics”, which included hits by Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande.
  - notahacker 8y ago
    Densely populated cities filled with mostly educated people are perfectly capable of riots driven by ethnic tensions and dubious claims, but Singapore's last race riot was in 1969[1]. Singapore had legitimate concerns about racial tensions in the 1970s and some of its more illiberal policies were arguably practical responses to those situations, but that was a long time ago when Singaporean society was very different, and this draft policy's clauses about making it illegal to publish material that "might diminish public confidence in a state body" seems to have other priorities. [1]There was another riot involving Indian construction workers in 2013, but that was a spontaneous [massive over]reaction to a bus driver running someone over, not something planned or stirred up beforehand. And that's every riot in Singapore since 1969...
  - neokantian 8y ago
    I suppose that mentioning Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande is just a ploy to enlist trad-con support for the bill. The real reason is that government power very much depends on controlling the official narrative while making sure that alternative ones do not gain much traction. This was so much easier to do when information was primarily distributed through centralized media, such as newspapers, radio, and television. Governments simply had much more power back then. The internet has eroded it. So, either they give up some of that excess power, or else they somehow manage to centralize the internet. The societal control that we inherited from the past is no longer compatible with decentralized distribution of information on the internet. The very fact that we are interactively discussing this topic today, instead of merely swallowing what is supposedly best for us, demonstrates the point actually quite nicely.
poptrex 8y ago
That's a pretty broad generalisation over a lot of countries that constitute Asia. Japan and Korea for example are consistently ranked above many west european countries in terms of freedom [1]. And many asian countries are at about the middle in these rankings. [1] https://www.cato.org/human-freedom-index-new https://www.cato.org/human-freedom-index-new
- darkpuma 8y ago
  Japan and Korea being highly developed nations with with capital punishment, unlike the developed nations of Europe, seems to support his point. Those were your counter-examples, probably because next to Singapore they look moderate, but they're not even good counter-examples. In 2014, 80% of adults in Japan supported capital punishment, making it far more popular in Japan than it is even in America: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/12/28/national/crime-legal/number-inmates-awaiting-death-penalty-japan-end-2017-expected-123/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/12/28/national/crime-...
  - poptrex 8y ago
    I'm not sure how capital punishment is relevant, but the US also has capital punishment, in spite of being "developed" and ranking high on the index. And the number of people actually being executed in the US is much higher than Japan or Korea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment#Capital_punishment_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment#Capital_pun...
    - darkpuma 8y ago
      Everyone here knows America has the death penalty. That's probably a big part of why you compared Japan to "western european countries" rather than America. Saying that a country has saner law and order than America is considered damning with faint praise. To reiterate: America executes more people than Japan, but in Japan execution is far more popular than in America. In America, capital punishment is very controversial, but in Japan it enjoys broad public support. To the original point, per wikipedia: >"Of the countries/regions categorized as 'very high' on the Human Development Index, 10 countries perform capital punishment: the United States, Japan, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Belarus, Oman, and Taiwan" Of those, one is in North America, one in Eastern Europe, five in the Middle East, and three in Asia. It strains credibility to suggest that Asia, moreso than Western Europe, is known for a progressive justice system. > "I'm not sure how capital punishment is relevant" Because the matter being discussed is "most Asian governments' preference for strict and harsh governance."

coldcode 8y ago

Unless there is some precise definition of fake news, this is just censorship in sheep's clothing.

rhacker 8y ago
Exactly. About 2 years ago Etsy started banning everyone that was selling crystals and also included "promotes good health or luck" And while that's probably fine to do from a trades perspective, I don't like the notion that we had to start leaning this way. If we keep leaning over at what point are we going to make it illegal to believe in UFOs (as in aliens) and ghosts. There's no scientific evidence to make those concepts not possible. Just evidence to make things we understand possible. And on top of that, we have some kind of fucked up exception for God. Even scientists are just unwilling to go on a rant to disprove god, but totally happy putting someone in the psych ward for believing in aliens kidnapping them. (im not talking about ALL scientists - of course you'll find them, but talking about bulk percentages here) Thought police are coming.
- katbyte 8y ago
  I think a line needs to be drawn. Those are sort of wacko ideas hard to disprove, but saying "hillary clinton is guilty of ____" or blatantly misrepresenting facts or lieing? that needs to stop.
  - atypicaluser 8y ago
    Who draws the line?
    - cannonedhamster 8y ago
      That would be the courts. Since libel/slander/defamation is already against the law. It's rather different from being misinformed and retracting the content and doubling down on lying because it's politically expedient. At least it was before this Presidency in the United States. I'm not sure how a purveyor of conspiracy theories being the ultimate enforcer of the law changes that, if at all.

robgibbons 8y ago

Souds more like they want a monopoly on propaganda.

Palptine 8y ago

Who fact checks the fact checkers?

ashelmire 8y ago
Interesting idea - are you more likely to be lied to in a) an authoritarian state with laws against fake news b) a democratic state with laws against fake news, or c) a democratic state without laws against fake news?
- partiallypro 8y ago
  What's democratic about outlawing speech?
  - laughinghan 8y ago
    "Democracy is a system of government where the citizens exercise power by voting." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy If the citizens or elected representatives in a democracy voted to start censoring speech, but continued to empower citizens to vote, it would still be a democratic state in spite of the censorship. An illiberal one, but still democratic.
    - dexen 8y ago
      >it would still be a democratic state Only through the first election cycle [1]. Your idea is valid in a static, nothing-ever-changes world, with no significant political dynamics to speak of. However, out in the world as we know it, political processes run all the time, the proverbial pendulum swings, and consensus is formed via vocal advocacy and protests. Right now we have four basic things defined as "political speech": person-to-person conversations; mass communication (press, TV, radio, online videos); peaceful physical actions like assembly and manifestations; and finally donations to candidates, parties and PACs. We protect each and every recognized form of "political speech" exactly because without it the important changes could not happen. In a world with limited communication, you'd have on one side a small ruling clique, semi detached from daily concerns, a large mass of disenfranchised and zoned out people coasting along in the middle, and on the other side you'd have a small fraction of disenfranchised and either abused or outright persecuted people that can't even raise the wider society's awareness. This is an unstable state, leading to societal collapse in one way or another. Let people speak effectively, lest they could not protest problems or oppression. Let people speak effectively, lest the wider society couldn't even learn of the problems faced by sub-groups. Being heard is the first, necessary step to having wants and grievances addressed. -- [1] tiptoeing around Godwin's law

jeffdavis 8y ago

One thing has been increasingly clear over the last few years: a lot of people are basically OK giving large governments more power and relinquishing what I think of as basic rights. Not just overseas, but here in the US a lot of people just don't care about rights and think the government is the solution to everything if you just give them enough power. Not sure how to keep rights, honestly. The Constitution and the courts help, but only for so long. The only thing I can think of is that it could work in a poorer country (or at least relatively poorer) because people would self-select to be there for the freedom, and people who don't care bout freedom would follow money somewhere else.

whoevercares 8y ago
They are evil but sadly they do deliver results and are right a lot so far. (Sorry to quote amazon LP) On the other hand, for some reason democratic negotiations become harder with no parties willing to make trade-offs
deytempo 8y ago
The countries without money wouldn’t have the power to keep the other countries from taking their freedom
CharlesColeman 8y ago
> Not just overseas, but here in the US a lot of people just don't care about rights and think the government is the solution to everything if you just give them enough power. I think claiming that people "don't care about rights" is being at least a little uncharitable. Things like fake news and disinformation are real problems, but citizens have ceded so much power to ever larger corporations; and those corporations have taken an ever more skeptical eye to the public good (in favor of focusing on shareholder value); that the only practical solutions to many problems may involve the intervention of a government. If you care about your rights, you really ought to want to break-up corporations like Facebook into little-bits, which would then make many of these problems more tractable to being solvable by collective action than government intervention.
- 8y ago

qroshan 8y ago

Fake News is a problem. without removing the basic freedom of speech, here is a law that'll curb it. When posting on Social Media, you must use a) Verified Name with a Verified Pic or b) Reusable anonymous ID like anonymous-323876 (Generic face profile for all anonymous users). or c) Fully Anonymous like anonymous with a common,generic face profile Sites can only use PII for verification, but must discard everything related to user and cannot tie PII UserID to any logs

laughinghan 8y ago
What leads you to believe the people spreading fake news on WhatsApp and Facebook, leading to death and violence, aren't already real people using their real names? In articles like https://www.wired.com/story/how-whatsapp-fuels-fake-news-and-violence-in-india/ https://www.wired.com/story/how-whatsapp-fuels-fake-news-and... there's no mention of anonymous, fake, or untraceable accounts, just real people being outraged and sharing misleading, sensationalized, or outright fake news, ultimately leading to tragedy. Not to mention, your proposal is barely different from what Facebook already does.
tathougies 8y ago
How is requiring someone to use a particular form of identification not also a violation of free speech.