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US tech giants warn India’s fact-checking rule will infringe on press freedom
- bediger4000 4y agoYou mean like the freedom of the press where in 2004, the NY Times spiked Risen and Lichtblau's story about NSA dragnet surveillance? This was in the fall of a Presidential election year, where GW Bush, a fairly unpopular president was running as a war president and ended up winning by a very small popular vote margin? How will I tell? Even fewer democrats get elected, despite republicans running with terrible approval ratings?
- jfengel 4y agoIsn't that kind of vacuously true? Of course fact checking infringes on the freedom of the press. It's supposed to constrain the press to tell something at least in the vicinity of the truth. That notion is controversial, because of the obvious conflict of interest in having the government police truth about itself. But it should also be pretty clear that "press freedom" wasn't really intended to be about making truth irrelevant. It was supposed to be about giving the press the opportunity to tell the truth, and hoping that the truth would generally win in the end. It seems to me that is hope is worth reconsidering. That's not to say throwing it out, but I always get nervous when I see people talk about "freedom of the press to lie" as if it were an obvious and unquestionable virtue.