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On the extreme end, a video can be totally fake. Slightly less extreme, a video might be "fake" in that it's an actor playing a role, and the words they're sayi

On the extreme end, a video can be totally fake. Slightly less extreme, a video might be "fake" in that it's an actor playing a role, and the words they're saying belong to the character and not the actor. More commonly, a video might be taken out of context, so that the apparent meaning of a statement in isolation is the opposite of what it originally meant. (Compare "I hate group X" to "I think people who say 'I hate group X' are jerks.") Modern politics is effectively a distributed indexing system for exactly these most ambiguous cases, coupled with large media apparatuses for broadcasting them. And these are the problems with the simplest sort of fact, "A said B." That's not even the majority of misinformation out there. We usually have to contend with even worse ambiguities, like whether A "caused" B, or whether A "supported" B, or whether A "criticized" B. In everyday life of course, these problems are solvable. We find ways to punish people for acting in bad faith, and the incentives mostly line up. But that is very much not how things work in politics or in law. People have large incentives to seek out ambiguous cases. These edge cases become the typical case.

MadWombat 7y ago
> On the extreme end, a video can be totally fake Sure. And either you can prove it or not. But that is not what I am arguing against. The way things seem to be working today, is that you say "person X cures cancer" and I say "person X eats babies", neither one of us has any proof whatsoever, but that is OK because nobody ever asks for proof because "hey, there is no such thing as facts anymore"
- oconnor663 7y ago
  That's fair. It's definitely possible to go too far with this. I guess what I want to argue is more like this: The problem here is sufficiently hard that, even though we can make definitive judgments about facts and misinformation in some cases, the value of doing so in practice will be low. But of course that's a pretty vague blanket statement that I'm making without any concrete support, and it would probably be better to look at the pros and cons of some specific idea about what the rules should be.

MadWombat 7y ago

> On the extreme end, a video can be totally fake Sure. And either you can prove it or not. But that is not what I am arguing against. The way things seem to be working today, is that you say "person X cures cancer" and I say "person X eats babies", neither one of us has any proof whatsoever, but that is OK because nobody ever asks for proof because "hey, there is no such thing as facts anymore"

oconnor663 7y ago
That's fair. It's definitely possible to go too far with this. I guess what I want to argue is more like this: The problem here is sufficiently hard that, even though we can make definitive judgments about facts and misinformation in some cases, the value of doing so in practice will be low. But of course that's a pretty vague blanket statement that I'm making without any concrete support, and it would probably be better to look at the pros and cons of some specific idea about what the rules should be.