5 ms·

I see at least a few problems with penalizing lies: 1. Who is going to determine whether a given statement is a lie or not? 2. What about sarcasm and works of

by mr__y 7y ago

I see at least a few problems with penalizing lies: 1. Who is going to determine whether a given statement is a lie or not? 2. What about sarcasm and works of fiction? (And who (and how) determines whether a given post was intended to be sarcastic or not?) 3. What about a context? For instance, exactly the same wording of a message might carry a different meaning depending on the content of other posts in a thread. While I believe that this is somehow clear and obvious, what is not obvious is what makes a full context - is it just direct parent post, or whole thread or maybe even a larger part of a website? What if selection of context makes a difference (for example if I just use parent post as a context, the statement appears to be a lie, if I judge by the whole thread it possibly appears to be sarcastic). Now, who (and how) decides which context should be applied for analysis? 4. Transnational problems - which laws apply and how would you enforce it? 5. What problems would it actually fix? Lets say that from now on, I am not allowed to post on hackernews that Barack Obama visited my parents (he did not, it's a lie) - what problem it solves that I am not allowed to post that? (edit: formatting)

jay_kyburz 7y ago
For 1 2 and 3 we rely on the courts. It's already their job to decide when somebody has broken the law or not. The courts need to decide if a reasonable person could tell if some writing is sarcasm or fiction, and if it was written to intentional mislead, then its a crime. 4 is just a hard problem we need to work through. 5. The problem that needs fixing is that people don't trust anything they read any more. Nobody knows what to believe and can't make a good judgement call about what is a trustworthy news source. This results in a polarised, ignorant society. If you post online that Trump likes your mums cooking, nobody is going to take you to court because the damages done is almost nothing. If you post online that Trump wants to evict all Chinese nationals from the country, well that's a lie that could cause some real strife, and I would be happy if that was just not written on the internet.
- mr__y 7y ago
  Relying on courts seems to suffer one problem: given the scale and amount of posts I doubt that any judical system is capable to process that amount of cases. Secondly, as it was already pointed in this thread, there are other ways to manipulate - for example by omitting some facts or simply rephrasing them. To give you an extreme but real life example, recently in Poland there was news about Robert Biedron, left wing politician who rescued a two year old boy and his father from a burning car, then according to other media he just allowed them to wait in his car before police arrived (and I can't honestly tell which version is true - this kind of supports your point), but there was also a headline that translates to "Car crashed and burning with a 2 year old child on board. Robert Biedron involved". While this obviously gives a completely inverse impression on the viewer, technically this is not a lie - all the information in that headline is true and 100% correct. Penalizing lying on the internet will not stop manipulation. Maybe just make it a little bit harder forcing the manipulator to be a bit more creative

by mr__y 7y ago

jay_kyburz 7y ago

For 1 2 and 3 we rely on the courts. It's already their job to decide when somebody has broken the law or not. The courts need to decide if a reasonable person could tell if some writing is sarcasm or fiction, and if it was written to intentional mislead, then its a crime. 4 is just a hard problem we need to work through. 5. The problem that needs fixing is that people don't trust anything they read any more. Nobody knows what to believe and can't make a good judgement call about what is a trustworthy news source. This results in a polarised, ignorant society. If you post online that Trump likes your mums cooking, nobody is going to take you to court because the damages done is almost nothing. If you post online that Trump wants to evict all Chinese nationals from the country, well that's a lie that could cause some real strife, and I would be happy if that was just not written on the internet.

mr__y 7y ago
Relying on courts seems to suffer one problem: given the scale and amount of posts I doubt that any judical system is capable to process that amount of cases. Secondly, as it was already pointed in this thread, there are other ways to manipulate - for example by omitting some facts or simply rephrasing them. To give you an extreme but real life example, recently in Poland there was news about Robert Biedron, left wing politician who rescued a two year old boy and his father from a burning car, then according to other media he just allowed them to wait in his car before police arrived (and I can't honestly tell which version is true - this kind of supports your point), but there was also a headline that translates to "Car crashed and burning with a 2 year old child on board. Robert Biedron involved". While this obviously gives a completely inverse impression on the viewer, technically this is not a lie - all the information in that headline is true and 100% correct. Penalizing lying on the internet will not stop manipulation. Maybe just make it a little bit harder forcing the manipulator to be a bit more creative