"Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts"
Thankfully, we've learned a few things since then and liberal (classic definition, not American definition), democratic minded people know how dangerous government defined truth (no matter how simple or well accepted) is.
There is a cost to this, of course - the citizenry is required to have a level of sophistication and erudition and they will be forced to make nuanced and complicated judgements about the state of their world.
If you find that too high a bar to cross, a "ministry of truth" may sound attractive. Please grow up and resist that urge. It may help to read about twentieth century dictatorships and the history of modern, repressive regimes in general.
Citizenry will do what they always have: accept the narrative that benefits them the most or that they've been indoctrinated to accept without questioning. The Internet isn't going to magically change human nature.
That doesn't mean that we need a Ministry of Truth a la Brazil or 1984, but this isn't an either-or issue. The Fairness Doctrine[0] was a fairly nice compromise. We have long required advertisers to be truthful, even using the extremely broad standard of "truth" set by the FTC. Why shouldn't news organizations be held to a similar ethical or moral standard? Does it benefit society if the only opinions broadcast as fact are filtered by corporate interests? That may be better than being filtered by government interests, but it's still not in the best interests of the public, is it?
"Why shouldn't news organizations be held to a similar ethical or moral standard?" [as advertisers or as broadcasters, apparently]
Among other problems, the definition of "news organization" is completely fluid in this Internet era. What organization in particular gets a truth or balance mandate? Some? All? Which ever ones the censors consider most credible?
"Does it benefit society if the only opinions broadcast as fact are filtered by corporate interests?"
Not sure how you got here. Proposing news organizations obey some "truth" or "balance" conditions essentially is mandating state filtering.
The Internet, so far, has allowed a wider dissemination of ideas than ever before. Are you saying that organizations, on the net, large and small, broadcasting their views, is "corporate filtered news?" Seems like you're stretching things to say the least.
>"corporate filtered news?" Seems like you're stretching things
It's worth noting there doesn't need to be a corporate agenda or government conspiracy for humans to exhibit groupthink about ideas. Of course most of human history existed before The Age of Reason made evidence-based reason en vogue; but even today you can read about things like NASA engineers who said exactly how and when the Columbia shuttle would experience a critical foam strike, or scientists who were met with hostility and disparagement when trying to debunk the encyclopedic-, and textbook-published myth about komodo dragons injecting a cocktail of deadly bacteria sith their bites. It seems humans just exhibit this appeal to authority/consensus as an inherent trait.
The current climate of promoting democratization, diversity, and freedom except when it comes to democratization, diversity, and freedom of ideas seems to be taking a step backwards for humanity.
I worry because people today aren't reading history. They don't even have any idea what took place in the 1980s during the Soviet era and how the fall of communism shaped today's Europe. I think about the Czechs fighting back, all the intrigue of the two Germanys. Vietnam, Central America...
The other thing is, even though the media was always biased and agenda-driven, they weren't completely infiltrated by intelligence agencies and/or mega-corporations.
How would you apply the fairness doctrine to the web though. Will I have to host opposing viewpoints on my blog or face fines? The fairness doctrine made sense back when your ability to broadcast your opinions was limited by the shared medium of the radio spectrum. But now that anyone with any viewpoint can broadcast to everyone via the Internet the fairness doctrine doesn't make sense.
I think if the fairness doctrine were applied solely to broadcast media (as it is described in aforementioned wikipedia link) then it works.
It's not a per-episode or per-program level, it's per-broadcaster. Also the fairness doctrine doesn't include (but worked in conjunction with) the Equal Time rule [1].
Paradoxically there are many people who are conditioned to believe the random blog over the newspaper. People have been told to "think for themselves" and "do their own research", and so when they stumble on a conspiracy-minded blog, it feels like a more authentic voice than mainstream media.
I don't know what the solution is. It's impossible and unreasonable to expect individual bloggers to hold the same standard as newspapers traditionally did. Maybe social networks could do something to educate readers?
Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard provocatively said once that real impartiality is 50% time for the Jews, 50% time for Hitler. I don’t think I should have to support the views I disagree with anymore than a government should be able to impose their views on my free speech.
The fairness doctrine makes little sense in the context of the internet. My random comment/post on reddit may in the course of a paragraph contain 5 different assumptions that may be orthogonal to the actual main point.
It will not contain therein space for alternative thoughts on the main point let alone space for any alternatives for any unexamined assumptions.
Truth is multidimensional and fairness impossible to determine to everyone's satisfaction. For example 2 people discussing the best way to travel around the world are unlikely to find agreement with someone who believes the earth is flat and impossible to fly around and 2 different types of dating artifacts are equally meaningless to someone who believes the earth is 6000 years old.
Alternative viewpoints can find themselves a home in the comment section or if undesirable there on your own home on the web.
Wherein the web isn't censored in a heavy handed fashion we have the most reasonable answer to the fairness doctrine. Everyone can be heard but not everyone will find an audience that desires to listen.
>Wherein the web isn't censored in a heavy handed fashion we have the most reasonable answer to the fairness doctrine. Everyone can be heard but not everyone will find an audience that desires to listen.
But is that really reasonable or fair? What decides who will find an audience to listen to them?
Free speech advocates seem to believe that the "best" speech will always find an audience, but I don't personally see any reason to believe that's true.
When a rich person can pay for a political advert on a major television channel, and a poor person can only publish to a blog no one has any reason to know exists, do we really believe that the latter's ideas will spread more widely if they are "better"?
I think people are starting to realise that access to an audience is far more important than the simple freedom to say something, and that this access is already heavily restricted in a variety of ways other than government intervention. But unlike the mere ability to speak, access to an audience is fundamentally limited. It's physically impossible for everyone to hear everyone else's views. So a simple idea like "Freedom of Speech" is not sufficient to allow us to decide how to structure our societal discourse.
> Why shouldn't news organizations be held to a similar ethical or moral standard?
At best it gives an imprimatur of credibility to unreliable information. (E.g. as with the food pyramid, doctors' recommendations regarding salt and eggs, etc.)
You could say the same of any expert opinion on any topic. That doesn't mean the wisdom of experts is less trustworthy, merely that humans aren't perfect.
In Norway the media has an ethics organization they vuluntarily join, which may make rulings on whether a news organization has abused their power or not. It doesn’t carry any actual punishment to my knowledge but it is a public embarrasment so media try to respect its rulings.
That would be a good idea and I'd support that. The only problem I think is that such things tend to break down once the size of a country scales. Like I'm not surprised such a system works great in Norway; there's only ~5 million people! A lot of the systems that worked fantastically in the US when it had a few million people broke down once it reached 300 million. Representative government begins to break down when one man is responsible for representing 500,000 individuals intead of 30,000. Scale really fucks with things in unpredictable ways. It really makes you understand how China and India can have such widespread and pervasive problems.
> Citizenry will do what they always have: accept the narrative that benefits them the most or that they've been indoctrinated to accept without questioning.
All human history of progress goes against this claim.
We abolished slavery a few centuries ago.
Marijuana is being legalized in various countries and states.
etc.
> The Internet isn't going to magically change human nature.
On the contrary, civilization has always challenged "what is acceptable/right/wrong/etc". The internet is allowing us to accelerate this process with easier communication between and congregation of dissidents.
Slavery has never been abolished. It was simply made illegal in most places under most circumstances. By any definition of slavery there are more people in bondage today than at any time in the past.
Even taking your claim of abolition at face value, the only reason chattel slavery was "abolished" in the US was because its abolition became a way of ending a particularly bloody war by taking away one sides motive for fighting. Before that (i.e. before a majority of the citizenry saw abolition as benefitting themselves) there was not enough popular support for abolition.
More people in bondage? in absolute numbers this is captain obvious level of argument since we have had a demographic explosion in the 20th century. Percentage wise you would be way wrong since poverty has been steadily decreasing everywhere around the world and very rapidly.
> We have long required advertisers to be truthful,
That didn't work at all. It just made advertisers sneakier. They still lie as much as they can, and when they can't, use tricks to focus peoples attention elsewhere, or move the ad on a medium where they can lie.
> that they've been indoctrinated to accept without questioning.
Which is made easier when governments define and outlaw "fake" news. What separated us from totalitarian governments in the 20th century was we protected speech while hitler/stalin/mao/etc outlawed "fake news".
Do you really want Trump or Obama or Hillary or George Bush to have the power to limit speech? Do you really want either the republican or democratic party to define and outlaw "fake news"? Do you want corporate interests to ban "fake news"? Oil companies bribing politicians to label climate change as fake news? Drug companies bribing politicians to label the drug epidemic as fake news? I certainly don't.
> As Theo van Gogh said: a tolerant society can not be tolertant towards the intolerant.
And who, exactly, are these intolerant? Nazis? Communists? Black lives matter? All lives matter? NRA? PETA? Feminists? James Damore? Abolitionists? Abortionists?
No. It was called an election. Hitler and the nazis were banned in germany for a while. So banning "fake news" didn't keep hitler from power.
> The fake news Hitler banned was the “fake” according to the same standard as Trump: news he didn’t like.
That's the point. Do you want trump to be allowed to ban news he doesn't like? I don't. And what turn hitler from an elected official to a dictator was the german governments ability to ban "fake news". If hitler never had the ability to ban "fake news", then he would never have been able to cause the destruction he did because people would have been allowed to challenge, criticize and intellectually attack him.
> This issue is not as cut and dry as you think.
It is cut and dry. It's the foundational principle of all free society. It's why we never had a hitler, stalin or mao in the US and it's why we never will as long as free speech is guarded. Free speech is the only antidote to totalitarianism.
> a tolerant society can not be tolertant towards the intolerant.
That's an absurd contradictory logic fallacy. Think about it logically. If you are intolerant of the intolerant then you are the intolerant. Also, the US has 250 years track record debunking that logical fallacy. Besides, that's exactly what hitler said. That's exactly what stalin said. That's mao said. It's what all totalitarians say to justify stifling speech.
> There is a cost to this, of course - the citizenry is required to have a level of sophistication and erudition and they will be forced to make nuanced and complicated judgements about the state of their world.
If we take a book from the 80s titled "How to Win at Chess" and try to update it for the 2010s, we have three choices:
1. Add the caveat: "Don't ever play against a computer."
2. Add an enormous chapter about how to use computers to play computer-aided chess which, if serious, would probably double the size of the book.
3. Assume that people smarter and more dedicated than the reader devote entire careers to making sure humans can play chess in an environment where it is difficult to cheat by using a computer.
In laymen's terms: sophistication and erudition just won't cut it. You have three choices:
1. give people a well-lit place to read news that cannot be attacked through the internet.
2. at least double the amount of education people need in order for them to make judgments in a digital world.
3. Assume this is a problem that dedicated career people must solve to keep the population from being trivially manipulated in 100 different ways by 100 different actors when they attempt to read the news.
In the '80s you would still meet better chess players than you. The techniques for playing against computers are much the same as those for playing against smarter humans. There are specific anti-computer strategies just as there were specific anti-Russian strategies, but they're equally minor.
> In the '80s you would still meet better chess players than you.
Sure. But in the 80s you'd never meet a player who is several orders of magnitude better than anyone who has ever lived. That's important.
Similarly, in the 80s you'd never meet a group of political operatives who could read dossiers on tens or hundreds of thousands of people and tailor propaganda for them to read while in a doctor's waiting room, or wherever they happen to be. That's important.
We can't beat supercomputers at chess by practicing chess really hard. And we can't beat digital propagandists by thinking harder about what they publish.
Computers aren't orders of magnitude better, at chess or propagandising. Yes previous propaganda wasn't individually tailored, but it was still produced by manipulation experts with vastly more resources than the individual reader. The same techniques for living in a world where propaganda exists still work.
It's intriguing that this is exactly the reverse of the argument (complete with "we've learned a few things since then") that people make when discussing ICOs.
The requirements for IPOs are important, they argue. Investor accreditation is important to prevent the naive masses from wasting their live-savings on snake-oil, they argue. "Please grow up and resist the urge" for unregulated securities, they argue.
I think both arguments generalize, which makes the contrast interesting. Is the SEC, in its role in preventing equity sales to unaccredited investors, a "ministry of truth", censoring some companies from speaking to people who would want to transact with them?
I would argue they're not, because they're not actually deciding who gets to sell equity. Anyone can sell equity—provided that party also discloses a whole bunch of information about itself. If it refuses to do that, then that party is restricted to only sell equity to people who are rich enough to not be risking much in an individual investment.
I think this could be a workable model for regulating the news media (including Joe random blogger.) If you're publishing to the world, then you have to disclose all the research that went into your piece. If you're unwilling to do that, then the state could have a right to in turn restrict where you can publish.
I think this could be a workable model for regulating the news media: you can publish whatever you like, as long as you disclose your entire fact-gathering process (i.e. "cite your sources") in a way where another journalist could do the same research and reach the same conclusions about what happened (i.e. "replicate your study".)
Whelp, there goes whistleblowing. Or generally any source that prefers not to be named. I think your proposal destroys some of the most important journalism.
Also, conclusions in journalism are not mathematical equations; they don't derive linearly from the facts. Who gets to decide whether that particular conclusion is or not supported by the facts?
Keep in mind, I’m not suggesting that the source would need to be named; I’m only suggesting that the data from the source would need to be able to be independently recollected from the same source.
In the example of a whistleblower, that would mean that the journalist would need to ensure that there was some secure anonymous route by which other journalists could get in contact with the same whistleblower to independently verify their story.
You wouldn't have done your job, as a journalist, until you had provided a reproducible way for someone else to come along and re-do your investigation without you, ending up with all the same facts, if not the same beliefs.
> Who gets to decide whether that particular conclusion is or not supported by the facts?
My proposal would be to separate journalism from editorial or opinionated conclusions. "The news" itself would only contain objectively-verifiable facts, without opinions; and then it would be the job of magazines, talk-shows, etc. to “interpret” the news, in much the same way the current news media itself currently interprets things like scientific papers.
In other words, “news” intended for the public would be trimmed down to the most boring and dry possible version of itself—like a cross between a wire service and a police scanner. Anything that wasn’t such, couldn’t legally be called “news”, nor could it suggest by its formatting that it is news. There would be a separation between "news" and "opinion" in about the same way there is an FDA-managed separation between "food" and "drugs"; and there would be public-awareness campaigns to make it clear that this division exists, and that any fact found in "opinion" sources that you haven't independently heard from a "news" source is suspect at best and more likely an active psy-op.
But, again, the state wouldn't be responsible for declaring who can or cannot publish (just like the FDA isn't responsible for saying who can or cannot manufacture drugs; and the SEC isn't responsible for saying who can or cannot sell equity.) The only job of this hypothetical MiniTruth would be to say—according to a very objective, independently calculable bar, determined by Congress—whether what a given party is publishing can legally be called "news" or not; and to punish parties that do call their publications "news" if they have not met the requirements to do so.
(Of course, there's no such thing as an unbiased source. The curated set of facts that end up put together into a news article is itself an editorial choice. But we already have a news media that generates every possible combination of such facts, so that bias, at least, sort of "evens out.")
Basically, your sources would need to be “made available” in the same way witnesses are made available during a trial: there to be interrogated by interested parties who want to dispute their story, even if also safe from harm (by e.g. witness protection.)
Which is quite unrealistic unless you're talking about blowing a story about the local bakery or something like that. If any journalist can access the witness, they have no real security. Journalists are not all incorruptible angels, and a whistleblower is already in danger by trusting just one or two.
Witness protection works by essentially making the witness and their immediately family cut off everyone they know and restart their lives with new identities. It's a tremendous cost to pay, and the only reason most do it is because they're also implicated, and want to cut a deal. Who in their right mind would completely ruin their good, law-abiding life just to report some corrupt politician?
You're being pretty uncharitable in assuming that there would need to be exactly one protection mechanism and that every source would necessarily have that same protection applied to it.
There are a spectrum of solutions to creating anonymity. If your source is just a faceless worker who happened to overhear something about their boss, then all they need from you is a burner phone, an email address on a public server, and GPG keys—all of which you can give out the public halves of.
If your source is Edward Snowden, and his information is about the state, then I would suggest that there's really no way to do things other than full-on "witness protection" in the sense Snowden achieved: the state is going to figure out who leaked the information, so even without giving other journalists access to your source, anonymity for them (where they currently live) is no longer possible. You may as well fly them to Russia; at which point they're safe enough that you can just give them the a public email address, tell them to access it from an Internet cafe over Tor, and now they've once again got a contact point that anyone else could interact with them through without "blowing their cover." So why not give it out?
If your source is just a faceless worker who happened to overhear something about their boss, then all they need from you is a burner phone, an email address on a public server, and GPG keys—all of which you can give out the public halves of.
But then how does that prove anything? I can give you an email address and phone number of someone who will tell you anything I want.
I cringe at my own pedantry here but I think it's important to the larger conversation.
All arguments generalize. That isn't just the point of the argument, it is what an argument is - a synthesis and generalization of evidence. That an argument generalizes isn't the problem, how and to what extent the argument does and the implications and chain of evidence for the generalizations is what matters.
I'm not sure. I was thinking about it in a type-theoretic sense: argument x being a function over (A Evidence) to give (A Conclusion). The type-class of A can be large or small: some arguments have an abstract structure that can be applied to all sorts of things, while other arguments are constrained by a bunch of qualifications to only be about rather particular things.
What I meant, to be clear, is that the two arguments I was referring to both are of the structure that starts with "people are dumb, and there is an agency that saves them from themselves" but then diverge by assuming different universal properties of organizations, using a concrete example of a good or bad organization and then assuming that those properties would always apply to an organization in such a role.
The SEC and MiniTruth effectively "do the same thing." The SEC is a bit more specialized, but it still does have an information-control/censorship role, saying what news the officers of a public company must always, and must never, publish about said company. So it's interesting, in my mind, to ask what "an SEC doing MiniTruth's job" would look like, and "a MiniTruth doing the SEC's job" would look like, and then to try the two original arguments again with those altered visions as their subjects.
I think the fact that people are allowed to invest in gold and bitcoin and lottery tickets shows that the government doesn't actually care about the unwary gambling away their life savings. Rather the government (or those who control it) want to ensure the best investments are kept for themselves. So they place barriers to investment, like accreditation, to ensure only those who already have wealth can participate in the most lucrative of markets. It's not "for your protection" its for the protection of the wealthy.
So Joe random blogger has to disclose his "thinking process"? "Well, I was thinking about this, so I wrote down this. Then in the shower I had another thought, and that's why I wrote this".
I wish people would think of consequences more. The consequences and logistics of what you're suggesting are horrible. And I think once you have to time to reflect, you'll agree.
1) She's criticizing the creation of a government-run media organization, not the creation of an org that punishes media organizations for false news. These things have different costs and benefits.
Also, believe it or not, government-funded media already exists. For example, there's Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, the various spokespeople of government agencies like the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Health and Human Services, etc etc.
With that in mind: why should one more new media agency be uniquely offensive?
2) Many of these arguments seem vague and conspiratorial. For example, it asserts that plutocrats really control all of our media. For this, it cites another article by the same author, which talks about Jeff Bezos acquiring Washington Post.
That seems like a pretty big jump to me.
3) Many of these arguments argue things that do not support her point. For example, it claims that the media is pro-establishment. Okay, so what? The establishment has some good qualities.
Imagine the skit from Life of Brian, "What have the Romans ever done for us?" but s/romans/establishment/.
The reason you think these points are unsupported is because there is a large context that people on the left are familiar with but the rest of us opinion is not because it is not regularly discussed in corporate media.
For instance, the work by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent documents how mainstream news consistently reinforces government narratives, even when they are based on lies (Iraq, Vietnam, etc). These organizations you mention are in fact propaganda outlets intended for foreign audiences or literally government agencies, they don't regularly directly criticize US foreign policy on other than a tactical basis.
The Jeff Bezos story is an example of the larger story of media consolidation where the majority of US media is owned by a handful of corporations. How often will such news organizations report conflicts of interest or report critically on their bosses?
The establishment position is bloodthirsty. That's a big point of contention.
Bad example. When the Roman empire fell the average life expectancy increased in all regions [0] and [1].
Turns out complex societies are used to funnel wealth to the richest at the expense of the poorest. Who would have thought, apart from anyone who has studied them.
[0] The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy, chapters 15 and 16
[1] Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070
>Many of these arguments seem vague and conspiratorial. For example, it asserts that plutocrats really control all of our media. For this, it cites another article by the same author, which talks about Jeff Bezos acquiring Washington Post.
> We find that transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic “super-entity” that raises new important issues both for researchers and policy makers.
Her views on the Douma gas attack and the Skripal poisoning (she takes the Kremlin line on both), are also well outside the political mainstream.
As a UK citizen, the implication that Britain was involved in poisoning its own citizens is not unlike how many Americans feel about '9/11 was a false flag'.
I haven't followed Skripal, but in the case of all attacks, I would like the fp establishment to wait for UN inspectors to render a report based on evidence before declaring whodunit.
The mainstream political opinion got us into Iraq, Vietnam,
sold arms to the Indonesians in East-Timor, and concocted a nuclear missile gap with Russia that never existed. I don't think it deserves any credence except where concrete evidence is provided (and this goes for everyone else outside the mainstream too).
Now that there are actually investigators on the ground, we can begin to answer those questions. Until the OPCW releases their report, we don't know that their was any gas released there at all. If there was, we won't know who released it.
If one were to ignore political biases, I think they would admit that there was more motive for the rebels to stage a gas attack to create international pressure for a cease-fire that allows them to escape a surrounded and hopeless position, than for Assad to bring the wrath of the world down upon himself to gas a completely surrounded and hopeless enemy. If you don't at least admit that such a thing warrants investigation, you are not being honest.
Were you troubled at how quickly the "political mainstream" came to consensus on what happened there, before any investigation had occurred?
Oh good grief. "Kremlin line", really? Why are we even worried about what she thinks on topics besides the one under discussion? Does this person's suspicions of various war pretexts have anything to do with her disapproval of a proposed truth ministry?
The bar isn't "too" high, it's somewhere in the 347th E8 lie algebra dimension high. We already live among "ministries of truth", they're just called science journals and studies. No matter how objective a field may seem to outsiders (mathematics, physics, astrology and life sciences), it is often plagued by dogma. The best people can do is pick their battles on what to educate themselves about, and even then the validity of information they find is often suspect. This is the natural outcome of living in the gap after the information explosion yet before fully autonomous verification.
>the citizenry is required to have a level of sophistication and erudition
Conveniently 17th century colonial Massachusetts had that too!
> the Puritans were a religious group that drew disproportionately from the most educated and education-obsessed parts of the English populace. Literacy among immigrants to Massachusetts was twice as high as the English average, and in an age when the vast majority of Europeans were farmers most immigrants to Massachusetts were skilled craftsmen or scholars. And the Puritan “homeland” of East Anglia was a an unusually intellectual place, with strong influences from Dutch and Continental trade; historian Havelock Ellis finds that it “accounts for a much larger proportion of literary, scientific, and intellectual achievement than any other part of England.”
> Furthermore, only the best Puritans were allowed to go to Massachusetts; Fischer writes that “it may have been the only English colony that required some of its immigrants to submit letters of recommendation” and that “those who did not fit in were banished to other colonies and sent back to England”. Puritan “headhunters” went back to England to recruit “godly men” and “honest men” who “must not be of the poorer sort”.
It's not productive to tell those who disagree with you to grow up. There are serious consequences from having unlimited freedom of speech and you are not encouraging serious discussion about solutions to them by belittling people.
I think it's also worth considering the effect that the internet has on the flow of information in society. Our current situation is not the same as it is when the first amendment was written. I'm not saying we should get rid of it and institute a Ministry of Truth, but we shouldn't assume that the people who wrote it were infallible and any differences between today's society and society 300 years ago don't matter.
Since the first amendment we've had 200+ years of nearly untrammeled progress. Before that, we in Europe had absolute monarchy and the divine right of Kings.
Now sure, they might have been wrong, and they're weren't infallible, but if you're seeking to overturn that, you probably need something more compelling than 'the internet has increased the flow of information'. It was the increased flow of information with the printing press that brought about the Enlightenment in the first place.
And places like China are now seeing the same kind of untrammeled progress, as their economy completely explodes under political conditions that 'the west' would consider counter to what they would consider correct/right/whatever.
Now to be clear, I'm obviously not advocating human rights violations, and strict governmental control ... I'm only pointing out that things like 'freedom of speech', while awesome and right IMO _may_ not exactly be the root cause of this age of prosperity.
Indeed. The next 10 to 15 years in China will either further set an example that you don't need American/European democratic ideals in order for economic prosperity and a good life for your citizens, or it will go a long way to disproving the idea that those can be separated.
With several eastern European countries trending in an authoritarian direction (and Turkey pretty far along that path already) I am worried about the effect that Chinese prosperity without democratic ideals will have.
Legatum rates China's prosperity at 90th in the world, alongside El Salvador and Nepal, precisely because the lack of personal freedom and environmental degradation act as a counterbalance against China's robust economy.
You can question the methodology, but then you have to make an argument as to why Norway, New Zealand, Finland, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Denmark, the US and other mature social democracies which routinely top these rankings are not good places to live. Very few citizens of those countries would choose to live in Xi's China instead.
I don't have to make an argument as to why Norway, New Zealand, Finland, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and the US are not good places to live. They are good places to live. That has nothing to do with whether or not China is a good place to live.
I only have to make the argument that personal freedom is not as important as economic prosperity. Since the end of the Cold War the general thinking was "democratic ideals -> economic prosperity -> good life". China's economic success without embracing democratic ideals to the extent that successful Western countries is making people and governments once again question whether or not the democratic ideals are actually needed.
I would rather live in the US or Europe than China at the moment, but how long will that remain true for most people if China surpasses the US as the world's reigning superpower?
> Very few citizens of those countries would choose to live in Xi's China instead.
But that's not the relevant question. The relevant question is whether the businesses of those countries would choose to do business from within Xi's China.
Oh, I'm with you there, but I'm skeptical that the lessons of the Enlightenment mean very much in a context where powerful business interests have actual control of public psychology to such an extent that they can convince people that they came to those conclusions of their own free will.
China has massively westernized and expanded its freedoms.
Sure, it still had a long way to go, but at least these days the Chinese government isn't arresting professors en mass and forcing them to work on farms.
Yes, this literally happened. It was called the cultural revolution.
As bad as humans rights and freedoms are in China, I think people really underestimate just how much worse they used to be.
China has massively westernized but as you say, the only reason it took massive westernization to get to where they are is because they were so far in the other direction.
There is a still a gulf between China's view of personal freedom and the West's view. It's also reasonable to be concerned that they will be moving away from the West's democratic ideals in the near future, seeing as their President just claimed the power to govern for life.
it's precisely the same kind of progress ... in the early 1900s, we were the poor country with plucky workers willing to do the hard manufacturing work. Then our middle class grew, and we no longer wanted to do that work, so we offloaded it to other countries. China is now going through that same growth. Eventually, their people will not want to do that work, and they will shunt it off to some other country (maybe using their massive investments in africa)
Well, yes, they have to play catch up now because we were/are ahead of them.
The question is whether or not they will always be playing catch up, and whether or not that's directly related to the personal freedom of their citizens.
Yes, my point is that we still don't know, so it's early to use them as evidence one way or the other. And with a lack of evidence, Chesterton's Fence implies we shouldn't touch it.
And if you are looking to defend it, you will probably need something more compelling than a correlation between prosperity and free speech.
Anyways, I'm not seeking to overturn it. I said specifically in my comment "I'm not saying we should get rid of it".
I just think we should be open to modifying any part of the Constitution. Many people refuse to consider this and think of parts of it as sacred doctrine. The first and second amendments, in particular.
> I just think we should be open to modifying any part of the Constitution. Many people refuse to consider this and think of parts of it as sacred doctrine. The first and second amendments, in particular.
The Constitution is hard to change precisely because it's hard to get widespread consensus on changes to such fundamental precepts of our society. Especially in a country as big and diverse in viewpoints as the U.S.
Given the current level of division in our society, I'm not open to modifying any part of the Constitution right now.
> Many people refuse to consider this and think of parts of it as sacred doctrine. The first and second amendments, in particular.
I don't know that people are unwilling to _modify_ it, but rather to _violate_ it. I honestly personally would be pretty happy with no 2A, but unless the specific majorities required for an amendment agree with me, I'm strongly against violating it ad-hoc. The rule of law is simply a lot more important than any given policy.
> I honestly personally would be pretty happy with no 2A, but unless the specific majorities required for an amendment agree with me, I'm strongly against violating it ad-hoc.
But we already are and have been for a very long time (the 2A has no limitation as tintypes of arms), and, more importantly, we’re violating the premise it rests on regarding reliance on the citizen militia without which it makes no sense (and we've been doing that for longer.)
Yes and to the extent that we violate it, I oppose it. Growing up in a peaceful society makes us take it for granted, but glancing at a history book underscores the importance of the rule of law.
What's the difference here between modifying and violating? Whether or not the amendment process is followed or a law is passed?
I fully agree that the amendment process has to be used. I would be in favor of a 28th amendment placing well thought out limitations on the 1st or the 2nd amendments. Assuming I thought that the limitations it was placing on them were good limitations.
> What's the difference here between modifying and violating?
The difference is between broad consensus and divided opinion. A Constitutional amendment requires a 2/3 vote of Congress to propose, and ratification by 3/4 of states (which means any Constitutional amendment would require support from both red and blue states). Ordinary legislation only requires a 50% + 1 majority.
Technically Congress is not needed to propose an amendment but I see your distinction and agree that I would only support changes ratified by 3/4 of the states.
> What's the difference here between modifying and violating? Whether or not the amendment process is followed or a law is passed?
Yea,that's like... The entire point of the constitution. This is like saying "what's the difference between changing a law or breaking and entering after asking your friend Jeb if it's ok".
> democratic minded people know how dangerous government defined truth (no matter how simple or well accepted) is.
Have we? Take a look at the state of the press in Sweden. It's not much different from China these days. Without freedom of speech, there is no freedom of the press. America is the only country that guarantees either. Although, I will concede that our press isn't much better these days. There's a very real problem when every media outlet in the country is owned by just five companies.
Sweden is undergoing a huge surge in violent crime, especially grenade attacks and rapes. The media can't report most of it because they're being perpetrated by migrants. Any media (social and mainstream) that's critical of migrants is being suppressed under threat of arrest under their hate speech laws. As a result, most of the people in Sweden are ignorant of the problem until they themselves become a victim.
The problem is not one of definitions. The problem is that interpretation and ambiguity even comes into the picture. It should be just demonstrable facts, that no one can deny. We've gotten to a point where "questions" and "opinions" and "sources" are being transmitted and amplified to the masses, so of course we all worry about who gets to control that amplification force.
i think something akin to libel laws might be interesting - if you knowingly publish untruths about me that's libel - about society in general that's ... fake news and you can be civility liable?
The problem always ends up being "who decides what is not true?".
Many people think that such a thing is not possible, or that the giving the Government such a power would be too much.
I personally think I could be persuaded to give such a power to the judiciary branch. I'd have to think about it a lot more before coming to a final decision, though.
We already have what is not true in Libel laws. And indeed in every branch of the law. (it's true he did rob the bank / breach the contract) for me the issue is not truth but laziness. No one decides if it is fake news or a breach of contract until the expensive court process is kicked off - someone wants to force the function to return. The cost is implying there is a sufficient loss (pace Peter Theiel) - and so it's worth deciding if this thing is true.
Truth is a slippery concept - and i would far rather - like you- we did not have a department deciding upfront what is or is not truth.
plus this idea might have the pleasing side effect of ministerial pronouncements being testable in court - although this is politics. Johnson's "350 million a week" bus was denounced as untrue from many quarters - but it was still a winning slogan - so perhaps the problem is still not fake news, but what people want to believe and why.
I don't think that juries decide what's true and what's not. They decide whether the evidence presented to them is sufficient to show that an event or events happened. My understanding is that even in defamation suits they are mostly trying to prove that person A said thing X about person C and then prove that person C was harmed because of it.
However, I am honestly not sure if it's just American first amendment indoctrination that makes me think that is significantly different than deciding what is true and what isn't.
> I don't think that juries decide what's true and what's not
That's literally what determining facts means.
> They decide whether the evidence presented to them is sufficient to show that an event or events happened
Yes, they determine the facts—what is true and not—by weighing the evidence.
> My understanding is that even in defamation suits they are mostly trying to prove that person A said thing X about person C and then prove that person C was harmed because of it.
They also decide whether X is true, and, if so, whether Person A claimed it with knoweldge of it's falsity or reckless disregard of the truth. But the other determinations are also decisions about what is true.
Truth is a defense in defamation cases. If that defense is presented, then a jury most certainly will attempt to determine if the defamatory statement is true.
And in almost any case, the jury is tasked with determining the credibility of witnesses.
> I don't think that juries decide what's true and what's not.
In a legal sense, that's exactly what they do. Juries are, by definition, deciders of fact, i.e. they decided what is legally true based on the evidence presented to them.
Whether legal "truth," epistemological "truth," and physical "truth" coincide is an entirely separate (and largely pointless) issue.
> The citizenry is required to have a level of sophistication and erudition and they will be forced to make nuanced and complicated judgements about the state of their world.
This is a fantasy in good company with, "free markets will always sort everything out fairly", "we don't need governments or regulations, just property rights", "unrestricted gun ownership will make everyone safer", and "the solution to clickbait is for people to just start reading the articles."
It depends on everyone suddenly becoming some kind of imagined ideal, just so that the world doesn't have to be so fuzzy and messy and can be reduced to simplistic mantras that any child can memorize.
> It may help to read about twentieth century dictatorships and the history of modern, repressive regimes in general.
It may also help to realize that the early 21st century has some issues that the early 20th century didn't. The power of business interests has now risen to compete on an equal footing with the largest governments, and in many cases is subverting or corrupting it. With so many people now being plugged in to some form of media or another, and so much of that media being controlled by a small number of powerful oligopolies, people are being influenced in ways that Hearst never could've imagined.
I'm ambivalent about legislating media, but there are a few incontrovertible facts IMO: this is a new problem for society, it's a serious problem, and people aren't going to magically become resilient to it overnight.
I think the people who are aghast at Trump sitting in the White House have already got some sense of the scope of this problem. For the people who are happy to see him there, I'd point out that a lot of leftists seriously floated the idea of Oprah running for president, and that only stopped because she wasn't interested. Imagine the amount of political influence she would have had through the media she controls, though.
As is so often the case, probably all that's needed to get right-leaning people on board with tightening regulations on media is for the left to find their Trump.
The BBC is not government funded, and all television news in the UK, including Murdoch's Sky News is required by law to be unbiased.
If it's a choice between the BBC and the constant, blatant, society distorting lies you see in American "News", I'll take my Orwellian dystopia thanks.
They are only required to provide "balanced" coverage during an election, nothing more. The BBC is absolutely biased, as was made clear during the 2014 Scottish Independence referendum. The distortions and outright lies they continually produced were astonishing to me.
You can see plenty examples of this at Wings Over Scotland (which I know is biased, but is also scrupulously accurate)
Ah, I was thinking of the election rules where they are required to give a representative amount of time to each party, not the impartiality rules which, frankly, are vague to the point of uselessness.
There may need to be some sort of compromise however if only this regard: We should not let hostile alien actors have free access to manipulate the political discourse.
Edit: this compromise, to my mind, would not involve the government approving stories, but perhaps restricting internet connectivity to and from those hostile nations.
Fake news is what got us dictatorships like Nazi Germany. Spreading lies about socialists and jews was how they gained votes.
In fact the nazis did just like the fox and the trump crowd today and labeled all mainstream news fake.
I don’t think you can dismiss the danger of such news environment. It plunged Germany into dictatorship. A too liberal democracy is vulnurable to totalitarians. We saw this in Egypt when anti-democratic muslim brotherhood gained power through elections.
And controlled "truth" about the west is what keeps North Korea afloat.
When people say that (insert liberty here) is what leads to Nazism, you're not making that liberty seem more dangerous. You're making Nazism seem less bad.
>A too liberal democracy is vulnurable to totalitarians. We saw this in Egypt when anti-democratic muslim brotherhood gained power through elections.
At no point in history has Egypt ever been accurately referred to as "a too liberal democracy". Hardline conservative/fundamentalist religious thought is a bigger source of the mess in Egypt than people having freedom.
We also know the cost of rapidly disseminated lies. Especially the effect those lies have on trust in mainstream news media (helps fox, hurts everyone else).
A well informed, educated citizenry has been the goal. Sadly it looks like a war on education has been waged by the right for decades now. Bush jr. revising bankruptcy law to permanently hobble those seeking an education before the drinking age has never been challenged. Instead college has sky rocketed and spending on public education has plummeted.
This whole "fake news" thing is absolutely ridiculous. What's interesting to me is that I very very rarely hear a fact touted by the left OR right that is just outright incorrect. The problem is much less to do with facts, and much more to do with implications or conclusions, which many news sources dish out handily.
I don't think it was ridiculous to begin with (neither was "terrorism") but it's ridiculous now.
I would define "fake news" as news published by people who know what they're publishing is false. My feeling is that either there were more of those kinds of articles floating around this past election or they were more visible.
You might just call it clickbait, but "fake news" didn't seem like an inapt descriptor until it started being applied to everything someone disagrees with.
There are certainly "facts" that I have heard people say or spread online that were clearly false like millions of illegals voted in the last election (when in reality one article claimed that and had lots of rebuttals and now has a disclaimer at the top of the article) https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/illegal-immigrants-2008-el...
However, the fact stands that there are also a lot more cases of wildly different interpretations of the same fact. We can look at poverty rates or crime rates and draw very different conclusions about the causes or solutions to those problems based on the same information.
"Fake news" has become a cure for cognitive dissonance, but it started out as "pizzagate" and its ilk. That certainly was fake, somewhat effective, and toxic. It's still around. Check out qanon, spirtcooking, etc.
Funny seeing such a local and current political tribe-based perspective in a discussion on the history of fake news.
As if they just happened to be witness to the spawning of some new phenomenon which also happens to be caused by their pet political opponents. Meanwhile in reality it's really been one of the oldest products of human-fallible mass media consumption (see: low investment content targeting emotion driven responses) used by every political ideology who happens to have influence over particular media sources.
That may have been your introduction, of a popular/easy punching-bag demographic pushing their own politically convenient narrative. But this particular story hardly extends beyond a niche of extremists (or at most a sizeable group of hopelessly low-education voters) on Reddit/Twitter. Notably these days including a large percentage of trolls who know better but will happily push it because they enjoy getting reactions.
I find it interesting to see how this type of misrepresentation and FUD is spawned by otherwise smart people. Beyond simply being young and naive by thinking everything you recently discovered is a new phenomenon. And ultimately I believe it has to do with their exposure to media within their small bubble of content sources, followed by a mass extrapolation to the wider public who identify with their adversarial political party. So they legitimately think it's an important problem and feature of x group, instead of almost every group a) by dumb subset after certain scale or b) the ideas of an entirely fringe group. But usually it's just a vocal minority of a niche forum gets applied to the wider public.
If outrage and reactionary politics was scaled to the actual influence and power of the groups they see as a threat the world would be a far more boring and stable place. But that doesn't sell Buzzfeed pageviews, or any newspaper commercially incentivized exaggerated narratives, nor does it translate well to 2-3 sentence long comments on social media sites.
Pandering, oversimplification, and snarky soundbites is what sells on reddit. It's the perfect platform for overblown FUD to spread. Which is iornic given how Redditors love to attack TV shows, targeting the emotions of the lowest common denominators, for doing the same.
I agree with almost everything you write here, but I just want to make clear that my comment was about the term "fake news", and not reactionary outrage, FUD, attack TV shows, Reddit, or anything else.
There is an entire world of straight-up fabricated "journalism" disguised as reputable reporting which gets immense circulation on social media networks. It is very easy to not experience this sort of thing, using fairly basic but overall uncommon steps. For instance, I don't use Twitter and I've filtered all my random acquaintances (e.g. random people I knew in high school) from my FB feed years ago. But there are patently false links being passed around at an enormous rate on these sites, and people that don't personally invest themselves into that sort of social media, or simply don't discriminate between who they see stuff from, get exposed to it a lot.
That's weird, I constantly see friends spreading outright incorrect, political trolling from clickbait factories like "Daily World Upate" or "America’s Last Line of Defense".
Bombs hit Syria vs bombs intercepted. Gassing by Syria vs false flag by Britain. Clearly, we do run into situations where multiple sets of facts are put forward. So fake news is not a ridiculous thing that never happens. Suggesting that it is because not all news is intentionally fake is like saying there is no such thing as war because we don't often see people killing each other.
Moving away from extreme cases, things are still wrong enough to cause trouble. False information is inherently surprising when presented as true, because it isn't expected. It follows that false information lends itself better to clickbait titles. This in turn leads to false information having better click through and sharing metrics. Sharing metrics and engagement metrics are used to power recommendation systems. So it follows that recommendation systems are biased toward recommending false information. Compounding the issue, content producers know this. They optimize their content for an environment which promotes false information, which biases content in a way that generates the sort of speculative conclusions you mention. As a natural consequence of the flawed environment, this flawed content is then seen by a greater number of people.
That out news system isn't as good as would like is just true. I still remember the TED talk when I found out about how much better the world was doing by most metrics. All those educated and rich people who could afford to attend a TED talk and yet the majority had no idea as to the true state of the world. If the news wasn't biased such that it presents a false narrative, then why such glaring ignorance among the educated?
Its a concerted effort to discredit expert opinion which the shorter term goal of allowing people to equate their own laymen's understanding with that of someone versed in a subject.
This is one of my pet peeves, people who boast about stumbling upon the correct solution and/or being first to something, but can't justify or backup their claim. Even worse is when they do the research afterwards to attempt to retrofit an answer. A derivative of this is when you have/know only one thing, but can't justify it in the absence of knowledge of the alternatives, but you still rally for it as if you were knowledgeable.
In math, if you only write the correct answer, you'll get a zero for not showing your work. In debate and discussions, there can zero, one, or more than one correct solution to a topic, and "showing your work" is often more valuable than having an answer, and answers can be right or wrong explicitly depending on your work.
Totally! I was one of these people in high school math! I remember clearly thinking "but i got the right answer >:(" and now as a professional engineer i reminisce about people who want to know why you are right.
Disclosure: I am a Nate Silver fan. Nate's expert opinion is only valuable if you accept the premise, which is that prediction science involves a range of possible outcomes. If you accept that premise, which I do, his opinion on the 2016 election, in which he stated several times that the odds of a Trump presidency were actually higher than most of the polls suggested, was arguably a more valuable opinion than either a coin toss, or most of the individual polls.
Yeah this seems to be the disconnect. A lot of people will intuitively think (myself included) something like this. "You said Hillary had 90% chance to win, but Trump won. Therefore your prediction was WRONG". It actually takes a little more thought to understand that a Trump victory was a possibility in the model all along. And that you cannot say whether or not a prediction model is accurate based on a SINGLE result.
Moreover, if someone makes a lot of predictions of people having "90% chance to win" and all of them win, that is a less accurate prediction than if roughly 10% of them lose.
You got lucky. If you can consistently beat his methodology then you'd be just as famous and wealthy and well regarded as he is instead of an internet nobody.
This is like saying "college is for the birds, I just plan to win the lottery."
>Is Nate Silver's expert opinion still more valuable than mine?
Absolutely. Missing the boat on what turned out to be something of a freak-show election where 77,000 votes out of than 136 million ballots cast is tough for anyone to get right. And most of who, did so by dumb luck, not some wonderful new methodology that is useful against past election data or current election data. The very same people beating their chests over Trump's win predicted Moore would win Alabama or Saccone would beat Lamb.
In other words its just dumb partisanship, not some new polling or statistical technique at work here. Patting yourself on the back because you 'called it' for Trump is a meaningless statement unless you have the math to prove your methods are better than Nate Silvers.
Silver predicted a fairly high probability of a very close election, including a 10.8% chance Clinton would win the popular vote and lose the electoral vote.
> All he said was that it would be closer than a landslide.
No, Silver's model provided a lot more detail than that.
The original meaning was literally something that looks like a news report, but reports as fact something that didn't actually happen and isn't obviously satire. As an example, "Pope Francis endorses Donald Trump".
That was, in fact a fake news story. The fact it asserted had no basis in reality.
The definition of "fake news" when I first heard the term more or less dealt with sites parroting outright falsehoods. It didn't necessarily have to be explicitly political. False gossip sites, outrage-inducing headlines to the wild side of the tabloids, fake business news (http://fortune.com/2017/05/30/fake-news-sites-local-business...), troll-ish article sites (ala the National Report), homeopathy woo (ala Natural News), and other conspiracy oriented venues (eg GlobalResearch, Infowars) were among the many types of "fake news" out there.
The political angle it has taken is unfortunate -- due to the prominence of "fake news" in the last US election; the net effect has been a devolution of the word into a snarl word for "I don't like your particular political point of view". IMHO what you are describing -- a news organization has a bias or opinion (strong or not), but still tries to maintain some degree of connection with factual data -- is not fake news.
You don't even have to look past the current President, who is the most prominent member of the Republican party and to a degree the political rightwing in the US. He tells outright lies on a regular basis.
He lies about trivially verifiable things like the weather and number of people at his inauguration, past statements he has made, about whether any presidents between Reagan and himself have cut taxes, about peoples faces openly bleeding from a facelift, about CNN/WaPo/NYT "failing", about the murder rate, etc, etc, etc.
That's about as useful as saying that Wikipedia may contain nonsense and therefore you shouldn't believe anything in Wikipedia. If you have examples of things on Snopes that are wrong then please supply them.
The beauty of Snopes is that it provides citations for its particular claims. People saying "Snopes is biased" in response to a Snopes article being posted don't tend to provide citations for why they think that particular Snopes article is inaccurate.
You're welcome to challenge their items on a line by line basis. Type it out, I'll wait.
There are also lots of other sources. I think playing up a 'no true scotsman' just empowers the liars because at a certain point you're just arguing that truth cannot be verified by anyone.
They have no valid credentials other than having been on the Internet a long time and having an interest in researching urban legends as laymen. One of the founders, David Mikkelson, couldn't answer questions about fact-checking due to legal issues[1].
If you really want to play the "HN says the names of logical fallacies" game, then I'll do you one better and say that challenging me to refute every single line item is an appeal to authority and we should just trust them because everyone says we should. There's no reason to believe them any more than there's a reason to believe much of anything published on somebody's personal website.
This is a reversed appeal to authority, and the fact that you keep attacking “credentials” rather than anything solid is telling. As Vkou said, they cite their sources. I’ll take that over vague hand-waving around credentials any day. Like people who dismiss Wikipedia, the issue is that you need a case-by-case basis to dismiss cited works.
They weren't appealing to authority though. An appeal to authority is "It's true because Snopes says so", they just linked to Snopes' reasoning as a shorthand for repeating the reasoning themselves.
If Snopes didn't provide their reasoning, it would be an appeal to authority.
You are defending the expert status of indisputable laymen by demanding a line by line refutation of everything they have ever written? And this seems not merely reasonable to you but you perceive it as upholding good reasoning and logic itself?
Every single one of Snopes' items could be correct and it wouldn't save your argument, because you're relying on the idea that what Snopes chooses to debunk is an unbiased representation of who actually tells more lies.
I was quite fond of the Weekly World News, particularly their article on how there was a gate to Hell in North Dakota and the Governor sending a tactical team to try to kill the devil.
I'm really happy to have my freedom of speech. I don't think i would do well under the classic Puritan model.
I do sometimes wonder if there's room for a special class of formal speech for journalism. Grant rights perhaps formalizing protecting a source. But also require some responsibilities. Not sure what the standard should be, but we do the same thing for lawyers and doctors.
Also "pernicious to the publick weal" is an amusing phrase.
For what its worth, we did do this though it is in part a sort of detente between prosecutors and journalists.
This wall has been eroded, with some of the most striking erosion happening around the threatened prosecution of James Risen for refusing to disclose a source.
That was the first thing that popped into my mind. Now you could subsitute "The Russians" or "Paedophiles" or "Terrorists" for that part in the narrative.
This is cool and interesting however I believe it's worth noting that the more pernicious issue is that the phrase "fake news" is used to discredit expert opinion that doesn't line up with one's preconceived notions. We replicate this by using the term at our own peril.
That perils applies to every single synonym for "false", including "level", "slander", "lie", "troll", etc. You can't police the dictionary as strategy to stop falsehood and false claims about falsehood.
"You can't police the dictionary as strategy to stop falsehood and false claims about falsehood." This is a beautiful way to explain this that I'm going to appropriate :)
This bit is so ironic to the point that I feel they must be trying to convey a message that is not directly stated. 17th century colonial Massachusetts. Doesn't that ring a bell for anybody else? Salem Witch Trials.
In 17th century Massachusetts the just arbiters of truth, naturally being the Massachusetts Government, would soon fall to frenzied lust in pursuit and prosecution of 'witches' for which they tried, convicted, and executed numerous individuals. The same body behind this is the one that was also responsible for judging what was true and what was false and doling out punishment accordingly...
One of the sites I love to visit every few months is http://literallyunbelievable.org/ which has screen caps of people that don't know what The Onion is.
The term only became popular after Trump's win [1], not while it was happening, which is forever (I once read in a real paper newspaper about an amputee who had donkey's legs attached in place of his own). This suggests people don't like it because they went looking for something to blame for his winning. It's entirely a partisan political concern, not a fundamental one.
I was in another country, and still seeing the political bias (CNN+) in the reporting. Call me old school, but 'news' and 'journalism' is meant to be impartial. It wasn't. Opinion piece after propaganda opinion piece.
I think maybe, we have just woken up to what is going on.
It became popular after he won because he started using the term incorrectly and labeling everything he disagrees with as fake news.
People weren't looking for something to blame his winning on. That's a loaded statement. They were looking for reasons that he won. That's a reasonable thing to do. We've never had a President like him. Our polling methods in the 2016 election didn't predict him winning. Obviously people missed something that was a factor in this election and fake news is one of the things they looked into.
Had Trump not butchered the term I doubt we would still be talking about it much in the public forum.
I'm not sure why either of these comments is being downvoted. They're both true at the same time, though I agree with you that the parent comment overstates what Trump actually did which was weaponize the critique into something to generally dismiss expert opinion.
I think you're seeing liberals and conservatives being even-handedly "triggered". Or maybe people are telling themselve that they are sick of politics being discussed, yet they keep coming back to it and lapping it up.
You're reversing cause and effect. Trump latched onto the term after the entire press started blaming his victory on "fake news" - that's where he got the idea from. (A lot of his ideas seem to just be whatever's been in the press last, actually.)
I am aware that Trump got the idea from the press, my point was that had Trump not stolen the term as a coverall for news stories he disagrees with then term would have been largely forgotten.
The Google trends map in the comment I replied to shows the original peak in Novermber of 2016 which I think started when Buzzfeed ran an article about fake news stories having more engagement on Facebook than true news stories leading up to the election. [1]
There's another peak in early December that is probably from Hillary mentioning it in a speech. [2]
There's a third peak in January which is probably from when Trump wouldn't let Jim Acosta ask a question and called him and CNN fake news. [3]
After that, it was officially added into Trumpian vernacular. Had he not started using the term incorrectly on a regular basis, we would not have seen the continued popularity of the word that the graph shows after December 2016. There would have been some peaks due to various academic studies about actual fake news coming out and being reported on but most of the popularity and staying power comes from Trump.
In case anyone forgot, the other five states in New England don't exist because MA was a welcoming place where the powers that be kept it's nose out of the business of the people. MA has always been the kind of place where you need to watch what you say about the people/groups in charge. It doesn't surprise me at all that speaking out in a provably false way was on the books as a crime in colonial MA.
And committed genocide against the original inhabitants and wiped out vast numbers of species. So, yeah, laws against Fake News as defined by a bunch of religious maniacs are great.
The "genocide" of native Americans was a result of European diseases, not barbarism.[1] As the people had no idea of germ theory, it is impossible to claim this was intentional.
Well that's an oversimplification. Diseases wiped out 90% before they ever saw a soldier. BUT...
'Instead, when the Indians were ready to leave, Trent wrote: "Out of our regard for them, we gave them two Blankets and an Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect."' -- http://www.history.org/foundation/journal/spring04/warfare.c...
More commonly rumored to be used by British against Americans, though.
How is it an oversimplification if 90% of the population decrease was because of initial contact, not overt actions by the Europeans against the natives?
Do you really need this spelled out, like for real? Your statement that the genocide was not due to overt actions by Europeans is false. Accidentally wiping out 90% of a population through spread of disease is one thing. Deliberately killing off much of the rest is another.. you seem to think of that as a rounding error lol? I also provided a citation in which an American soldier admits to attempting to infect natives with small pox, despite his lack of germ theory. This also explicitly contradicts your account.
Yes, the number killed by warfare is a rounding error in this context. And finding a single instance where someone suggested (there is no proof it was carried out) trying to infect the natives is an anecdote, not proof of a systematic program of biological warfare.
I just provided the historical evidence. It was written in the past tense. Do you think he fictionalized his account so that hundreds of years later you'd have a stronger argument on HN lol? Can you think of another reason to fictionalize such an account? Will be be ignoring the fact that just a few posts ago you maintained with equal confidence that this could not have happened at all?
More importantly, the argument that American settlers and later government policies deliberately exterminated large populations of natives does not even remotely rest on this. Are you really conflating them? Are you that ignorant of the history?
You also don't seem to understand the concept of genocide, the whole point of which is that it's extra bad to kill off a population as it gets smaller.
What a disgusting excuse for a thought process. What is it do you think that's wrong with you that gives you such a deep need to ensure that your ancestors were morally pure?
Calling something an anecdote is not saying it is untrue. Anecdotes can be entirely true yet still tell us nothing about the prevalence or significance of the described activity. And I never stated that the kind of activity described in your anecdote never happened. (Please provide a citation for this assertion.) I stated such activity was not the reason for the reduction in the population of indigenous Americans. Who do you think my ancestors are and why do you think this? My ancestors had nothing to do with any of this. And there is no such thing as moral purity, not that I would care about it if there were. What we like we call good (moral) and what we don't like we call bad (immoral) and that's the entire scope of what "morality" is. You should engage in some self-reflection and evaluation regarding your own poor reasoning abilities before criticizing those of others.
What is the subject that intentional modifies in that sentence? That would be the 90% reduction in the native population, right? You aren't going to win any attempt at verbal/logical gamesmanship with me.
I've been reading a lot about pamphleteering in the 1600s. 'Mass media' fake news has been around for quite a while; Cromwell and the Puritans were particularly adept at it.
[BURR]
Can we agree that duels are dumb and immature?
[HAMILTON]
Sure
But your man has to answer for his words, Burr
[BURR]
With his life? We both know that’s absurd, sir
[HAMILTON]
Hang on, how many men died because Lee was inexperienced and ruinous?
[BURR]
Okay, so we’re doin’ this
"treating groups that are perceived as weak with courtesy" Not respect because it can include dishonestly flattering them which disrespects their ability to handle information. Also, not everyone - only members of particular groups. Political correctness advocates can be brutally bullying towards people they don't like the views of.
I can only speak for myself here, but I never found being "PC" to be incongruent with how I normally treat people. Never in my every day interactions have I considered whether or not what I do or say is PC.
Treating people with respect without expecting anything in return gets you far.
Thankfully, we've learned a few things since then and liberal (classic definition, not American definition), democratic minded people know how dangerous government defined truth (no matter how simple or well accepted) is.
There is a cost to this, of course - the citizenry is required to have a level of sophistication and erudition and they will be forced to make nuanced and complicated judgements about the state of their world.
If you find that too high a bar to cross, a "ministry of truth" may sound attractive. Please grow up and resist that urge. It may help to read about twentieth century dictatorships and the history of modern, repressive regimes in general.