[HN Gopher] Letters from House members to cable providers [pdf]
___________________________________________________________________
Letters from House members to cable providers [pdf]
Author : temp8964
Score : 186 points
Date : 2021-02-23 14:43 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (eshoo.house.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (eshoo.house.gov)
| jspaetzel wrote:
| This type of messaging only exacerbates any misinformation being
| spread. The only impact this could have is that right wing groups
| will have another real world example for fresh conspiracy
| theories. This pushes the divide wider.
| dd36 wrote:
| So don't collect data on disinformation?
| boredumb wrote:
| I'm old enough to remember when calling private news agencies
| Fake News was an assault on our Freedom of the Press.
| qntty wrote:
| Is anyone else confused at how this is legal? I have no expertise
| in law, but my understanding is that the Supreme Court has agreed
| with the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama
| that.
|
| > Racial discrimination in state-operated schools is barred by
| the Constitution and "[i]t is also axiomatic that a state may not
| induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what
| it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish." Lee v. Macon
| County Board of Education, 267 F. Supp. 458, 475-476 (MD Ala.
| 1967).
|
| Isn't this promoting a private person to accomplish what the
| federal government is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish?
| And wouldn't this also apply to the federal government as well as
| states?
|
| https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/108851/norwood-v-harri...
| noodles_nomore wrote:
| Yes, Greenwald pointed out the same thing in a recent article:
|
| https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-escalates-pressure...
|
| Edit: Another article just went up about exactly this.
|
| https://greenwald.substack.com/p/house-democrats-targeting-r...
| qntty wrote:
| Yes that's were I originally saw the reference
| korethr wrote:
| I'm not confused as to how it's legal. I'm quite sure it's not.
| However, it seems to me that except in rare cases, no matter
| the color of the tie worn by the politician, nominal legality
| is not an impediment. There's an ideological opponent out there
| who must be publicly punished for his wrongness as an example
| to anyone else who might dare be wrong, and while the
| Constitution forbids various explicit means of doing so, there
| are myriad implicit ways of approaching the same goal.
| kodah wrote:
| There was nothing about race in this entire document.
| qntty wrote:
| Ignore the part about race.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >Is anyone else confused at how this is legal? I
|
| They can't legally force the companies to comply and they know
| that but it doesn't matter. This is a threat: "If you don't do
| what we tell you to do, we'll make your life miserable". If the
| companies don't willingly comply, then they can launch a FUD PR
| campaign through activist non-profits orgs and claim that these
| companies are hosting hate speech. Too cynical?
| hcurtiss wrote:
| Not sure why you're being downvoted. That's precisely how it
| works.
| cameroncairns wrote:
| Reading the letters, they are only signed by two Democratic
| members of the house. They are both on the committee for
| communications and technology, but they only represent 2 of 28
| voting representatives.
|
| This really feels more like a publicity stunt on their part to
| please their constituents than some sort of concerted effort by
| the Democratic party, but perhaps someone with more insight on
| congress could enlighten me.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Energy_Sub...
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| No, you probably have it right. House members pretty regularly
| do weird performative things they don't really expect to lead
| anywhere; it's increasingly seen as part of the job.
| tarboreus wrote:
| Is anyone finding this terrifying? When did democrafts, the party
| I vote for, become the people calling for tight censorship in
| every sector? Weren't the last people to make this move (more
| more ineffectively, thankfully) the Christian right? Is there
| something we can do to stand up for speech?
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > When did democrafts, the party I vote for
|
| Probably around the same time as it became socially
| unacceptable not to vote for them? Note how you had to qualify
| yourself as a democrat voter as some kind of proof point of the
| validity of your claims?
| ntsplnkv2 wrote:
| ~75 million people voted for Donald Trump - it is hardly
| socially unacceptable to vote for a republican and you have a
| secret vote anyway.
| jimbokun wrote:
| For the most part, it is socially unacceptable to vote
| Republican if you live in a large US city, and it is
| socially unacceptable to vote Democrat if you live in a
| rural area.
| skynet-9000 wrote:
| > it is hardly socially unacceptable to vote for a
| republican and you have a secret vote anyway.
|
| Those two things are not in conflict with each other: a
| sizable percentage of Trump voters may have been counting
| on the fact that they could secretly vote in order to
| protect themselves and even their jobs.
|
| It seems that, today, some vocal people arguing for
| censorship immediately assume that anyone on the side of
| free speech and liberal thought is secretly a Trump
| apologist.
| ntsplnkv2 wrote:
| > Those two things are not in conflict with each other: a
| sizable percentage of Trump voters may have been counting
| on the fact that they could secretly vote in order to
| protect themselves and even their jobs.
|
| Black people have lost their jobs for years for being
| black (See, Kaepernick.) many mad about this post didn't
| care then. It's all fake, using free speech to coverup
| blatantly partisan items.
|
| They can't actually be on the side of free speech and be
| a Trump apologist. He was extremely anti-media, one of
| the most anti-press presidents we have had.
| quercetumMons wrote:
| Kaepernick did not lose his job for being black.
|
| You can be pro free-speech and anti-media for the same
| reason you can be capitalist and anti-corporation.
| offby37years wrote:
| If you're convinced fascism has arrived in America, you'll
| excuse any means necessary to topple the dictator and to
| prevent a reoccurrence. The issue is in doing so, they've
| become the tyrannical force they propose to oppose.
|
| "Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing
| the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is
| down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it
| becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a
| country where everyone lives in fear." -- Harry S. Truman
| [deleted]
| citilife wrote:
| To be frank, the democrats have been directly calling for
| increasing amounts of censorship for years... In 2016-2018 it
| was slow at first: de-platforming people, refusing to let
| conservatives on media, etc.
|
| Since, 2018-2020 has been almost a militant level of censorship
| being pushed.
|
| There's a boatload of examples, but generally I recommend
| trying to join / visit different communities. While the right
| has been targeted to an extreme you can still see their points
| of view on gab.com or patriots.win pretty much uncensored.
| rayiner wrote:
| Democrats were proponents of free speech when Republicans
| controlled the media, culture, and institutions. Increasingly,
| the media, culture, and institutions are controlled by
| progressive Democrats (and I think there is a growing schism
| between liberals and progressives on this front), and
| traditional liberal ideas of the free exchange of information
| have no more value.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| Which is exactly why no matter where you land politically,
| you should be 100% in favor of fighting for free speech for
| yourself and the other side.
| PTOB wrote:
| This human has read his history.
| Spivak wrote:
| I think there's a disconnect here. Does free speech have to
| include someone knowingly purposely spreading
| misinformation with the intent to deceive people? Or
| someone speaking with the explicit intent to harm another
| person?
|
| Because I think nobody should be able to silence your
| thoughts, ideas or opinions but those things don't
| encompass all speech.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >When did democrafts, the party I vote for, become the people
| calling for tight censorship in every sector?
|
| When Trump got elected and it broke people's brains. At that
| point, everything became permissible in order to fight Trump.
| Now that Trump is gone, you can't put the genie back in the
| bottle.
|
| Since Trump, the Democratic establishment has effectively
| captured Mainstream Media, Big Tech and Social Media (with
| Academia being already firmly in the Democratic tent).
| Mainstream media and Big Tech isn't even pretending to be
| objective anymore. There is now an incestuous pipeline between
| executive leadership in those institutions and the Democratic
| establishment. And I say 'establishment' because it isn't just
| the Conservatives, Republicans and Libertarians that are
| getting censored. I don't like the anti-war, anti-American,
| class-focused Left, but those groups also get targeted, as are
| Progressives that focus on class (as opposed to cultural)
| issues.
|
| >Weren't the last people to make this move (more more
| ineffectively, thankfully) the Christian right?
|
| Apt analogy. This is the 'Christian Evangelical Right' from the
| 90s, with similar level of puritanism ... and with the backing
| of media companies and big tech. So much much worse.
| mnouquet wrote:
| > When Trump got elected
|
| Gamergate pre-dates Trump, and was the exact same mentality,
| which you can probably trace back to the 1970's if not
| before.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I can't help but think 'puritanism' is a personality trait
| and there has always been a sizable portion of the American
| public dedicated to policing the thoughts and behavior of
| others. The underlying ideology may have changed, but the
| archetype sure hasn't. Maybe the so-called SJWs of today
| would have been Temperance activists 100 years ago.
| hntrader wrote:
| It's an authoritarian personality type which exists on both
| the left and the right. It's remarkable that when we look
| at the many personality subtraits of authoritarian types on
| the left and the right, they align extremely closely with
| one another.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I've noticed that there is a common belief amongst Democrats
| and Progressives that people are duped into holding
| conservative viewpoints because of Fox News. Whenever I have
| asked people on the left why they think Republicans and
| Conservatives believe what they believe, the conversation
| always includes references to Fox News and the repeal of the
| Fairness Doctrine. So in that sense I can understand why so
| many Democrats want Fox News dismantled.
| rayiner wrote:
| I agree that many people think that, but it gets the
| chronology precisely backwards. CNN has been on the air since
| 1980. Fox News didn't even exist until 1996, and didn't
| become popular until 2000. Fox News is a _response_ to media
| bias,[1] not the other way around.
|
| [1] And by "bias" I don't necessarily mean open bias. CNN
| wasn't partisan in the 1990s like it is today. But it still
| provided news filtered through a liberal ideology. For
| example, 71% of republicans say religion "does more good than
| harm in American society" versus 44% of democrats:
| https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-
| tank/2019/11/15/republicans.... If you limit the analysis to
| white Democrats (the people who run newsrooms) the disparity
| is even starker: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-
| tank/2018/05/23/religiously... ("Religiously, nonwhite
| Democrats are more similar to Republicans than to white
| Democrats").
|
| Do you think that someone who believes religion is an
| negative force in society, maybe jokes about religious people
| to friends after work will report on COVID-related church
| closings the same way as someone who believes religious
| practice is important to societal health? Even if they are
| acting utterly in good faith, their ideology can't help but
| influence their choice of stories, the gloss they put on
| developments, etc.
| lftl wrote:
| I believe you've transposed "harm" and "good" in your
| quote. The linked Pew article lists the question as "Do
| more good than harm."
| zug_zug wrote:
| The truth is, we don't know the causality. Nobody has a
| good explanation of what makes an otherwise normal,
| intelligent person believe Q-anon, for example. We have
| some ham-fisted theories about how Hitler riled his country
| to exterminate Jews, but it's not really a nuanced enough
| explanation to say when/if something like it could happen
| again [nor assure us it won't].
|
| I'd like to pretend that we're all rational agents, but I
| know that there are certain "emotional backdoors" that
| people like Hitler have exploited in the past to get people
| to do horrible things against everybody's interest.
|
| For those of us who live in a country controlled by the
| will of the majority, obviously the education of the
| average person is a priority.
|
| If the shoe was on other foot, and I had a mainstream news
| channel that had 40% of the population angry and believing
| demonstrably false things (e.g. Aliens were running the
| country and I could point out the aliens for you), and I
| was hinting/insinuating a revolution was necessary, how
| hard would you defend my cable TV show?
|
| [Edit - Lol, I know I've got a pretty solid argument when
| nobody can answer the question but only give a pouty
| downvote]
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| >Nobody has a good explanation of what makes an otherwise
| normal, intelligent person believe Q-anon, for example.
|
| It's easily explainable, on the contrary, it was an
| intelligence psyop using half-truths that was setup to
| perform the two fold-function of honeypotting and
| distracting the "conspiracy theorists" who might look
| into the Trump admin and understand it's _real dark
| underbelly_ , which is completely different from the one
| the MSM pushed for four years, and then to be used as
| most limited hangout psyops are; as a tool to discredit
| genuine conspiracies as crazy by association.
|
| So now people like you who are probably fairly
| intelligent, but probably not keeping up with the
| underlying truths in the "half-truths" side of the
| phenomenon that was Q, can easily just discredit those
| who believe it as uneducated (usually the nicest term
| used), without understanding how they got there, and that
| you also lack education, at least in that department.
|
| So thats the sort of high level overview, but I can give
| you a few examples about how psyops manipulate otherwise
| intelligent people to buy into that sort of thing.
|
| 1. Hope and belief: After the war, I ended up becoming an
| atheist and started to notice in my studies on that
| topic, more specifically in conversations with old
| christian friends, that much of their belief system
| stemmed not from the truth of the matter, but from the
| hope it gave them. Further, from the need for hope, and
| need for belief it provided. Q-Anon exposes to some
| limited degree that the elites are up to some very shady
| shit, and then said: "Don't worry, it's being taken care
| of! Trump is a good guy, antiestablishment revolutionary
| who is going to take them down from the inside, and drain
| the swamp!" And for a certain amount of intelligent
| people who know the elite are indeed up to nefarious
| things, that's so tempting to _want to believe_! Having
| been on the Q-board from more or less day one, I do want
| to make a point that the first few months were full of
| very original and deep "bread" (research postings), by
| the more intelligent from the conspiracy and chan
| community. After a few months when the game became
| increasingly obvious to those people, but as it gained
| more noteriety and more normies showed up, the
| demographics shifted noticeably, primarily towards the
| religious right... a group who have already demonstrated
| their ability to suspend critical thinking when it comes
| to belief. The vast majority if not all of the people
| (besides the q psyop group themselves) that did the best
| work left knowning what the intent was (this was max a
| few months into the forced switchover to 8chan)
|
| 2. Real truths: I'll just come out and say what most of
| it really is: the multi-national, multi-intelligence
| agency compromise operations are completely out of
| control, and target most if not all high level
| politicians and businessmen. There is a myriad of
| evidence, buth deductive and inductive, to support this
| claim. Epstein was just a disposable middle manager in a
| blackmail network, for example. When analyzing this issue
| it quickly gets to the darker stuff people don't want to
| think about or talk about. My usual summary of how it
| works is that the order of operations for
| compromise/control go like this; idealogical - at a lower
| level , say a freshman state congressperson, having
| idealogical alignment is enough to get them to do what is
| wanted, no real overt control need be exerted, but lets
| go to the next level; bribery. This is standard
| congressional fare. Lunches, parties, pac donations,
| kickbacks of various kinds to both the campaign and to
| causes the campaign wants pushed, cushy jobs and
| kickbacks for relatives and friends of the
| congressperson, etc. All mostly legal, with a few
| outliers like Jack Abramoff pushing the edges of that
| level. What happens when you get a congress person who
| doesn't play ball though? This is where you start to run
| into the higher levels, such as pure blackmail. Cameras
| are setup, and it starts with the after-after-party,
| usually just drugs at first. Then it's hookers. Then it's
| underage hookers... and it gets worse. Human trafficking,
| and worse. If for some reason the rare person with
| integrety survives all this, that is when the threats
| begin (and they are not empty!). This is all true stuff.
| But no one is actually doing anything about it, because
| most of the people in a position to do so are already
| compromised are at the very least afraid.
|
| What Q did was exploit that these things really happen,
| by creating a false narrative that tended to only focus
| on the democrats participation in this system (both
| parties are completely compromised in this way, anybody
| remember Dennis Hastert?), and then pretended to offer a
| (false) hope by saying Trump was an anti-establishment
| savior, despite his many connections to this very system!
| For example, his mentor Roy Cohn was a CIA and Lansky-
| gang (who blackmailed Hoover) connected pedo-blackmailer
| very much in the vein of Epstein! Then creating other
| false narratives to distance the more obvious connections
| between him and that world (for example, pushing the
| narrative that he didn't like Epstein because of his
| pedo-tendencies, but in reality their spat was over a
| real-estate deal that went sour, and had nothing to do
| with Trump having a higher moral compass (laugh) than
| Epstein). Then taking all these things and promising
| there was always some action going to be taken around the
| corner, next week, next month, next year, stay tuned,
| etc... and none of it ever materialized.
|
| So for a people who find so much value in the need for
| hope and belief, mixing real truths with half-lies and
| then pretending something would be done was a recipe made
| in heaven for the people behind Qanon. The media, who
| didn't want to address any of this just lied through
| their teeth about the Russian narrative, created a
| reinforcement mechanism that they weren't to be trusted,
| which pushed even more "normies" over into Q-territory.
|
| Now, as you see the push for censorship and castigation
| of all things Q-anon, remember all nuggets of truth
| inside the half-truths are going to be thrown out baby
| and bathwater style... and I argue that this was the main
| intention all along (along with the cries of "domestic
| terrorism" being used to push all kinds of horrible
| things). Cass Sunsteins cognitive infiltration system is
| at play and is the modern evolution of COINTELPRO.
|
| PS. For just one example in a myriad, look up the Dutroux
| Affair, aka Belgiums X-Files sometime, if you think that
| darker stuff isn't true/doesn't happen. (warning, not for
| the faint of heart)
| maxerickson wrote:
| You've misquoted the survey, inverting the result.
| Republicans think religion does _more good than harm_ at
| that rate, and the other way around for the other guys.
|
| That it was a typo is clear enough from the rest of your
| comment.
|
| CNN isn't partisan though, they are just sensationalists.
|
| Like I think you could treat Ron Johnson like a jackass and
| not be partisan, and they don't even do that, they act like
| he is a straight shooter and play out the kayfabe.
| rayiner wrote:
| Thanks corrected.
| sneak wrote:
| The dirty secret of American hyperpartisan battle is that the
| two parties in the US are fundamentally identical where it
| counts: pro-surveillance, authoritarian war machines.
| Clubber wrote:
| And don't forget pro-corporate, which has been historically
| the norm, to the point of overthrowing other governments to
| protect crop yields / revenue.
|
| There was a study that came out a few years ago, and I can't
| find it, but the point was that any laws passed that the
| general citizenry want were purely incidental. All the laws
| passed over the last 20 years or so directly benefited
| corporate and special interest groups.
|
| Another person described the spectrum of the various forms of
| democracy as a highway. The went on to describe the two US
| political parties as the two parallel lines dividing the
| highway.
|
| /rant
| 74B5 wrote:
| I think many US americans despise the german approach to
| censorship of speech. Here in germany, we have not freedom speech
| but freedom of opinion, which makes a very crucial distinction.
|
| There are two kinds of statements, descriptive and normative
| ones.
|
| Descriptive statements explain "as is" relationships like "this
| door is blue" or "2 + 2 = 5". It does not matter if the statement
| is false or not.
|
| Normative statements cover subjective "should be" relationships.
| These are opinions like "it should be 3 years parental leave" and
| thus protected in german law as beeing unrestricted. This is,
| what is needed for free public discourse and not the right to
| claim falsehoods.
|
| In germany, you cant freely say that "jews are all criminals" and
| "the holocaust never happend". Over here, you can get penalized
| for public statements like these because (a) they are not
| opinions but wrong descriptive statements and (b) explicitly
| noted as beeing illegal. Whereas in the Us all speech is free
| (insults and such excluded ofc).
|
| The question is, where do you draw the line. To which point can
| wrong descriptive public statements still be tolerated and where
| might they harm society or individuals? From the german
| perspective, this question is easy to answer and i am considering
| the storm of the capitol here :)
| bzbarsky wrote:
| First of all, "insults" are not excluded from free speech
| protections in the US, except in very narrow circumstances.
|
| Second, the distinction between normative and descriptive
| statements, as you define them, is not always clear-cut. As a
| simple example, is which bucket is "I think these doors are the
| same color" when said about a red and green door? What about
| (to use your example, but with a slight tweak), "I think all
| <insert group> are criminals"? Note that the "I think" was
| implicit in your phrasing, though maybe the implicit vs
| explicit distinction matters.
|
| Third, even for statements everyone agrees are descriptive
| there may be widespread disagreement as to whether they are
| true. Example: "Donald Trump is a criminal." The US approach to
| this is to generally try to avoid having the government be the
| arbiter of truth, with some narrow exceptions for libel and the
| like. The German approach, as you note is different, not least
| due to different historical experiences. Which approach is
| better depends a _lot_ on circumstances and culture and norms
| and so forth. The German one places a lot more trust in the
| government not abusing it's truth-determination power than the
| US one does.
| tgflynn wrote:
| As far as I can tell these letters were signed by only 2 members
| of Congress. As such the title "Letters from House Democrats"
| seems misleading. That title suggests to me that some
| substantially representative fraction of the House Democratic
| delegation is behind these letters. That does not appear to be
| the case.
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we've tweaked the wording to address that. Thanks!
| TrispusAttucks wrote:
| To determine misinformation you must first determine information.
|
| We would need to setup some government entity to determine true
| information.
|
| We could call it the "Ministry of Truth".
|
| Unless that name is already taken?
|
| ... the cold wind blows...
| zug_zug wrote:
| If only somehow the government could determine what is true...
| </sarcasm>
|
| When somebody is accused of a crime we just have to say "Guilty
| according to whom?" and let them go, because there's no way to
| know what's true. Sure the DNA says he murdered 3 children, but
| what are those scientists really after!
|
| If only there were some organized system for appointed people
| with great track records to somehow listen to both sides of an
| argument and produce some sort of "judgment" at the end. But
| that's impossible, because only the TV box knows what's true.
| Alas...
| stickyricky wrote:
| > If only somehow the government could determine what is
| true...
|
| You say this in relation to a criminal trial but two things:
|
| 1. The government can not determine guilt or innocence. It
| determines guilt beyond a reasonable doubt which is a
| distinction worth considering. There is an implicit admission
| of uncertainty and unknowability.
|
| 2. A panel of judges determining truth is a concept that has
| existed historically and in fiction. It plays out exactly as
| you'd expect it would. The powerful control the panel and
| suppress all those who dissent.
|
| Surely you haven't thought this through. Do you really want
| the entirety of your life to be a criminal trial where a
| panel of judges (or citizens) determine what you ought to
| think and feel?
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| This is a red herring because the letter doesn't call for the
| legal system to determine what's true and false, it tries to
| pressure cable companies to drop cable channels that the
| ruling party doesn't like.
|
| Regardless, the legal system does in fact make mistakes. We
| have the legal system because in some cases final decisions
| have to be made - who to imprison and who not - not because
| it's a perfect system. The fact that we need a system for a
| limited purpose doesn't imply that we should expand it's
| power indefinitely.
| mnouquet wrote:
| > If only somehow the government could determine what is
| true... </sarcasm>
|
| You got the definition backward, Truth is what the Government
| says it is, not the opposite, cf. historical truth set by law
| in France and other European countries. Records can always be
| altered to fit the current narrative.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| >Sure the DNA says he murdered 3 children
|
| Does it? Enough labs have shown to be unreliable in handling
| evidence and being able to follow correct procedures.
| Remember back when the bite marks showed they were the
| murderer, or the skull shaped showed them to be a killed, or
| they didn't float so they must've been a witch?
| zug_zug wrote:
| In a way you're agreeing with me. You're pointing out how
| hard it is to find what's true, and the obvious answer to
| me seems - better science.
|
| Have the DNA sent to 3 separate labs to test blindly
| against a control (blind tests are a huge component of the
| scientific method), require consensus from all 3 labs.
|
| Modern scientific method also was the solution to
| "phrenology" (skull shape).
|
| At least I assume you're not arguing all scientific
| evidence in court should be inadmissible?
| ldbooth wrote:
| I think they would do better to solve the business model at the
| genesis of the issue. The Attention economy brought the
| conspiracy and outrage machine to each of our phones. There's an
| addict in my pocket. We need the political willpower to say "Yea
| you are a rich money making company, but a harm for X, Y reasons,
| and therefore this is the new regulation for companies profiting
| on an attention based model." There will be fallout, solutions
| require it, we must have courage and stop putting companies and
| money on a pedestal above people.
| helen___keller wrote:
| > The Attention economy brought the conspiracy and outrage
| machine to each of our phones.
|
| Speaking of, just take a look around the responses to this very
| submission
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Does anyone have any proposals for dealing with mass
| misinformation other that aren't censorship? I mean specific
| ideas, not just "people need to be more decerning"?
|
| I ask because I don't like censorship but I feel we're
| approaching a point where we have censorship and democracy or we
| don't have democracy anymore. And I like democracy...
|
| * information isn't glamorous, so unless we redesigned the whole
| media market it won't win by itself.
|
| * educating people is noble, but it will take 80 years for the
| humans currently alive to be replaced by a new generation of
| educated people. And that's assuming a high success rate in
| education to spot fake news etc.
|
| * there are very few ways to reform democracy that might improve
| this. We could require people to pass simple tests before they
| can vote, and blackout non-fact-only news for a month before
| elections. But I already hear how that's not much better than
| simply censoring fake news.
|
| Any other ideas?
| [deleted]
| curiousllama wrote:
| 2 parts of this are interesting to me.
|
| The first is "House Democrats demand" - the government should not
| be regulating speech, even if it's false/dangerous/moronic. The
| letter is dumb and dangerous.
|
| The second is "Cable providers to censor misinformation" -
| infrastructure providers regulating speech sounds very similar to
| the whole Parler deplatforming. I wonder what my own reaction
| would be if cable companies independently kicked off (say) OANN
| after the Jan 6 riot. Is the private-to-private speech regulation
| ok?
| garg wrote:
| The government should be regulating the broadcast of false
| information that is blatant propaganda. Freedom of speech is
| not freedom to broadcast blatant lies to millions of people.
| phkahler wrote:
| In that case, _all_ the media would be shut down.
| garg wrote:
| Incorrectly yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater is illegal.
| Why? It is a lie and It is a public safety hazard. Making
| that illegal has not shutdown all speech.
|
| In the same way, fake news that is blatantly incorrect,
| harmful to public safety, and made purely for profit and
| propaganda is not going to shutdown best-effort truthful
| news media created with the intent of informing the public.
|
| There is always the possibility of corruption and a
| reduction in genuine free speech when there is regulation
| involved. But we could experiment with getting media
| freedom watchdogs involved with the process to ensure fair
| compliance.
|
| There are many clues that can be looked at from the owners
| of the news media, their revenue streams, their involvement
| with foreign governments, to determine whether a company is
| a legitimate news source or not.
|
| The alternative to this is exactly what we have been seeing
| all over the world. In the US alone, the Capitol building
| was attacked because fake news media informed its viewers
| that the election was stolen. And any amount of informing
| that audience would not change their mind because they were
| sufficiently brainwashed.
| minikites wrote:
| Stepping back to a larger discussion about censorship, how
| exactly is "the marketplace of ideas" supposed to fight blatant
| falsehoods and other propaganda/misinformation? Ignoring it
| doesn't have the best track record so far, even Mark Twain
| figured out that a lie can make it halfway around the world
| before the truth even starts.
| exabrial wrote:
| We can't have people thinking those wrong thoughts! Stop them at
| the source.
| eplanit wrote:
| It's political theater, but is still relevant and noteworthy as
| this kind of action pierces through the "but this isn't about the
| 1st Amendment because they're private companies and can de-
| platform anyone". Once FB, Twitter, or a cable company start
| censoring due to government pressure, then 1st amendment
| arguments are indeed applicable.
| macspoofing wrote:
| What's new here? This has been a new normal for Democratic
| establishment over the last 4 yours. Democratic establishment
| essentially captured major culture institutions, specifically
| Mainstream Media, Big Tech and Social Media and Academia, and now
| they are settings their sights on internet providers and cable
| companies.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| It's heavy handed, but not surprising. My guess is they're trying
| to collect information to make a case for some sort of fine
| and/or injunction and/or censorship of specific instances of
| misinformation that may be related to the recent insurrection.
|
| The courts have held that government can restrict free speech to
| further national security, so it's not novel. At the same time,
| proving a relationship between media corporation misinformation
| and the insurrection would be very difficult.
|
| _Periodically, the Supreme Court has examined whether the
| government can restrict speech to further the compelling
| interests of national security. In doing so, the Court has
| recognized that national security, as a governmental interest,
| does justify restrictions on First Amendment rights. In the
| landmark free press decision Near v. Minnesota (1931), the Court
| established a general rule against prior restraints on
| expression. However, the Court did note that the government could
| shut down a newspaper if it published military secrets: "No one
| would question but that a government might prevent actual
| obstruction to its recruiting service or the publication of the
| sailing dates of transports or the number and location of
| troops."
|
| Nevertheless, the government must provide proof that national
| security interests really are in play--that is, the government
| cannot simply use national security as a blank check to sidestep
| constitutional challenges. In New York Times Co. v. United States
| (1971), the majority of the Court rejected the government's
| national security justifications for attempting to prevent the
| New York Times and the Washington Post from publishing the
| Pentagon Papers, the top-secret history of the U.S. involvement
| in the Vietnam War. In his concurring opinion, Justice Hugo L.
| Black explained that "the word 'security' is a broad, vague
| generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the
| fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment."_
|
| https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1134/national-s...
| [deleted]
| mudil wrote:
| Glenn Greenwald specifically discusses these developments in
| today's writeup.
|
| https://greenwald.substack.com/p/house-democrats-targeting-r...
| saurik wrote:
| So, one thing that is interesting to me here is that cable
| companies do choose which companies to allow as channels. Like,
| they aren't merely a dumb pipe to access the world of television,
| hopefully having a disregard for what customers watch, but
| instead take an active role in curating their catalog to choose
| channels and content that will be accessible to their customer
| base.
|
| Due to this, while I personally find the premise of this demand
| chilling, it more argues to me that cable companies almost
| deserve their fate here: I think it would be entirely fair to try
| to hold cable companies at least somewhat liable for all of the
| content broadcast on all of their channels.
|
| Like, arguably, to me, this feels the same as the Section 230
| controversy, but since a cable company isn't an "interactive
| computer service" I guess they are left out in the cold. If you
| really believe in Section 230, maybe you feel like it should be
| expanded to cover this scenario. And, if not, maybe you feel like
| cable companies it's catalogs of channels should either 1) do
| tons of fine-grained limitations and/or filtering or 2) simply
| not exist so that people can get their information from an actual
| platform (which cable companies actually already provide anyway:
| the Internet).
| ncw96 wrote:
| Worth noting that these letters are from two relatively low
| ranking members of the House Democratic caucus, not from anyone
| in leadership.
| fullshark wrote:
| Worth noting that one of these members is the representative
| for CA-18 (Eshoo) which includes parts of silicon valley:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California%27s_18th_congressio...
| mnouquet wrote:
| Merely useful pawns, I wonder what's they have been promised.
| yters wrote:
| When men exercise their reason coolly and freely on a variety of
| distinct questions, they inevitably fall into different opinions
| on some of them. When they are governed by a common passion,
| their opinions, if they are so to be called, will be the same.
|
| - Madison, Federalist No. 50
| jolux wrote:
| This title should be changed, it doesn't reflect the content of
| these letters. They do point in a concerning direction, but this
| is not a demand for censorship.
| temp8964 wrote:
| " 4. What steps did you take prior to, on, and following the
| November 3, 2020 elections and the January 6, 2021 attacks to
| monitor, respond to, and reduce the spread of disinformation,
| including encouragement or incitement of violence by channels
| your company disseminates to millions of Americans? Please
| describe each step that you took and when it was taken.
|
| 5. Have you taken any adverse actions against a channel,
| including Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN, for using your platform
| to disseminate disinformation related directly or indirectly to
| the November 3, 2020 elections, the January 6, 2021 Capitol
| insurrection, or COVID-19 misinformation? If yes, please
| describe each action, when it was taken, and the parties
| involved.
|
| 6. Have you ever taken any actions against a channel for using
| your platform to disseminate any disinformation? If yes, please
| describe each action and when it was taken.
|
| 7. Are you planning to continue carrying Fox News, Newsmax, and
| OANN on U-verse, DirecTV, and AT&T TV both now and beyond any
| contract renewal date? If so, why? "
|
| Not a demand for censorship?
| jolux wrote:
| >Not a demand for censorship?
|
| No, those look like questions to me. A demand for censorship
| would be "stop carrying these channels." Such a demand may
| follow after these questions are answered, but do they not
| constitute a demand for censorship of themselves.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| and when the mafia boss says, "You have a beautiful family"
| he is only complimenting you.
| jolux wrote:
| That's not an argument.
| mnouquet wrote:
| Yes it is, but obviously, you only taking these questions
| at face value.
| jolux wrote:
| I can only read what words you put on the page, I'm not a
| mind reader.
| mnouquet wrote:
| You must have issues interacting with people IRL...
| andyv wrote:
| "Nice channel lineup you have here, it would be a shame if
| something happened to it."
| delecti wrote:
| Is there any difference between the ~12 copies of the same letter
| in this PDF?
|
| But to the point, this is chilling. The last administration
| started down a dangerous precedent of claiming some news sources
| were less entitled to their right to exist. Just because I happen
| to agree that the channels being targeted here are garbage
| doesn't mean I think we should allow the government to make that
| decision.
| protomyth wrote:
| Its a press release so each representative has to have their
| own letter so they can distribute it as a press release. It is
| fairly typical.
|
| Using the government to suppress opposing views is the very
| definition of tyranny. Anytime people talk about a "reset" the
| populace suffers.
| AlphaWeaver wrote:
| Each letter is going to a different provider - for example, one
| is to AT&T, one it to Amazon.
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| I suppose they mean disinfo and not misinfo?
|
| seems like a slippery slope when one can't trust their own people
| to be able to distinguish between facts/non-facts, so much that
| one needs laws to ban certain types of content and prevent it
| from being seen. makes me wonder if this will not even cause
| further conspiracy and drive traffic to alternative (underground
| e.g. outlawed) information channels
|
| pretty hard to draw a line especially in relation to
| satire/comedy etc. There is no point of irony/satire if it has to
| be labeled as such.
| sleepysysadmin wrote:
| >I suppose they mean disinfo and not misinfo?
|
| misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and lies
|
| PDF says all of the above. Obviously the democrats are the ones
| who will define what's a lie. Any Americans here think it's
| appropriate to allow the democrat party to define what's a lie
| and then have it censored?
|
| "Right-wing media outlets, like Newsmax, One America News
| Network (OANN), and Fox News"
|
| It's interesting that the democrat government is pressuring ATT
| to deplatform their political opponents.
|
| >seems like a slippery slope when one can't trust their own
| people to be able to distinguish between facts/non-facts, so
| much that one needs laws to ban certain types of content and
| prevent it from being seen. makes me wonder if this will not
| even cause further conspiracy and drive traffic to alternative
| (underground e.g. outlawed) information channels
|
| I have never in my life seen such a political divide in the
| USA. It's very much like during the Vietnam war. Afterall the
| USA has now been at war longer than it ever has been.
| temp8964 wrote:
| Flagged. Lol. Because the letters didn't use the exact words
| "demand", "censor". Haha.
| dang wrote:
| You broke the site guidelines with that title, which was
| neither accurate nor neutral (see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26240472). Using titles to
| editorialize isn't "haha", it's against the rules and will
| cause you to lose submission privileges on HN. That goes double
| for divisive, inflammatory topics like this one. If you
| wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the
| intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
|
| I've changed the title and turned off the flags because (a)
| this is an interesting new phenomenon in the sense of the HN
| guidelines, and (b) the thread is fortunately not a huge
| flamewar, at least not yet.
| unanswered wrote:
| You would have changed the title of a hit piece against
| Hitler himself on the grounds that he didn't call for the
| genocide of all Jews, just putting them in camps to
| concentrate.
|
| Disgraceful.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| dang: I'm not particularly sure in what way this is a new
| phenomenon. It's basically just US politics as normal.
| temp8964 wrote:
| NYT used the title "House Democrats Press Cable Providers on
| Election Fraud Claims", I don't think it is much different
| and I think my edit is based on the actual content in the
| letters. But thank you for unflag the post.
| NeonVice wrote:
| These media companies are regulated by the FCC, so media
| companies will now feel pressured to effectively regulate free
| speech on behalf of the political party in power to avoid any
| negative repercussions in unrelated matters.
|
| It's disturbing that the constitution limits the government from
| quelling free speech so now the government is pressuring private
| companies to achieve what they are forbidden to do on their own.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| "How many of your subscribers tuned in to Fox News, Newsmax, and
| OANN on U-verse, DirecTV, and AT&T TV for each of the four weeks
| preceding the November 3, 2020 elections and the January 6, 2021
| attacks on the Capitol? _Please specify the number of subscribers
| that tuned in to each channel_. "
|
| Does this strike anyone else as a nakedly partisan move?
| bioinformatics wrote:
| I am surprised that they didn't ask for a list of the
| subscribers including SSN.
| throwaway8582 wrote:
| It's political censorship disguised at fact checking. If they
| were really concerned about "fake news", they would apply the
| same standards to the other side. Remember how just a couple
| years ago almost all of the major media outlets were pushing a
| conspiracy theory about "Russian Collusion"? Yet nobody is
| talking about shutting ABC, CBS, NBC, or MSNBC down, kicking
| them off cable, or banning them from the internet.
| unanswered wrote:
| Careful, most people including most HN readers still believe
| in the Russian Collusion theory despite it being quietly
| disavowed by the press.
| ardy42 wrote:
| > It's political censorship disguised at fact checking. If
| they were really concerned about "fake news", they would
| apply the same standards to the other side. Remember how just
| a couple years ago almost all of the major media outlets were
| pushing a conspiracy theory about "Russian Collusion"? Yet
| nobody is talking about shutting ABC, CBS, NBC, or MSNBC
| down, kicking them off cable, or banning them from the
| internet.
|
| You're misremembering. Russian collusion was an _allegation_
| that needed to be investigated because of 1) the actions of
| Russian intelligence agencies to influence the election in
| ways advantageous to Trump, and 2) weird things members of
| the Trump campaign did that were suspicious. However, the
| major media outlets only reported on that, and it didn 't go
| on to claim that there was actual collusion.
|
| For instance, here's the first page of results from major
| media outlet search for "Russian collusion" (ending the day
| before the Mueller report):
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/search?dropmab=true&endDate=20190321.
| ..
|
| > BRIEFING Judge Doubles Down on Scrutiny of Roger Stone's
| Book
|
| > POLITICS Roger Stone's New Instagram Post and Book Draw
| Scrutiny After Gag Order
|
| > POLITICS Trump Lawyer 'Vehemently' Denies Russian Collusion
|
| > POLITICS 'Collusion Delusion': Trump's CPAC Speech Mocks
| Mueller Inquiry
|
| > POLITICS Trump Says There Was 'No Collusion' With the
| Russians
|
| > OPINION The Russians Were Involved. But It Wasn't About
| Collusion.
|
| > POLITICS Indictment Details Collusion Between Cyberthief
| and 2 Russian Spies
|
| > OPINION How Will 'Collusion' Play in the Midterms?
|
| > OPINION Can We Please Stop Talking About 'Collusion'?
|
| > OPINION Oh, Wait. Maybe It Was Collusion.
|
| That last piece sounds like it's the closest to saying there
| was collusion, lets see what it says:
|
| > What remains to be determined is whether the Russians also
| attempted to suborn members of the Trump team in an effort to
| gain their cooperation. This is why the investigation by the
| special counsel, Robert Mueller, is so important.
|
| That's not pushing a conspiracy theory.
|
| On the other hand, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, etc. _lied_ to
| the extent that they 're legitimately worried about the
| conspiracy theories they were pushing costing them a lot of
| money from defamation lawsuits:
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/19/business/fox-smartmatic-
| news-...
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/05/media/lou-dobbs-fox-show-
| canc...
|
| https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2021/02/03/newsmax-
| mike-...
|
| However, I don't fault you too much for this confusion. There
| are a lot of liars out there who've found a lot of success
| "arguing" with false equivalencies to keep their followers
| loyal to the cause.
| ABeeSea wrote:
| The bi-partisan Senate Intelligence Committee report detailed
| collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian
| nationals/intelligence assets.
| hpcjoe wrote:
| Worse than that, it is an attempt at intimidation. Given
| today's climate, it would not surprise me if it works.
|
| Look at it this way. The capital riot on 6-Jan was planned and
| discussed on Youtube, facebook, and twitter. Apparently, barely
| a mention on Parler. Yet Parler was excoriated and deplatformed
| for it, and for not policing its comment sections. Yet Youtube,
| facebook, and twitter have faced no consequences for their ...
| whats the word I heard used about Parler ... complicity?
|
| This is a dystopian future.
| sharklazer wrote:
| > This is a dystopian future
|
| No, pretty sure it's now. This is a dystopian society we live
| in today.
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| This is disinformation.
|
| https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2021/02/01/civil-
| war-...
|
| https://nypost.com/2021/01/16/aoc-slams-facebooks-mark-
| zucke...
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-blocks-qanon-
| accounts-c...
| mikece wrote:
| The question today is "how many" but the question tomorrow
| will be "what are their names?"
| koolba wrote:
| And they have that information too. Digital cable delivery
| means that the cable companies have a record of which
| channel you watch and at what time.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Facebook was regularly kicking people off for problematic
| comments (it certainly didn't get all of them).
|
| That was many people's motivation for going to Parler in the
| first place - frustrated with what they believed being tagged
| as "false", frustrated with repeated bouts in Facebook Jail,
| etc.
|
| There's a dichotomy that one of the major motivations for
| Parler uptick is because of something you imply never really
| ever happened on Facebook.
| ABeeSea wrote:
| Parler was kicked off of AWS for violating AWS's policies.
|
| I'm pretty sure I don't have to tell you that YouTube and
| Facebook don't use AWS.
| _-david-_ wrote:
| Why were they removed from Google and Apple's app stores
| while Facebook, Youtube and Twitter are still available?
|
| Twitter uses AWS for some of their stuff. Why aren't they
| removed for violating AWS's policies?
| notional wrote:
| Do you really need an explanation of why a multibillion
| dollar company wasn't removed and why a fringe app was?
| squidlogic wrote:
| Why do you think it wasn't removed?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| We just want people to admit that the reason was a lie
| kube-system wrote:
| This is a silly conclusion.
|
| If a gang member and a methodist get into a bar fight, do
| you think the fair thing is for the bar to ban both gang
| members and methodists?
|
| No -- it is entirely reasonable to treat fringe groups
| that foster fringe ideas differently than large diverse
| groups.
| _-david-_ wrote:
| Since the fringe people were on Facebook, Twitter and
| YouTube it seems like we should be banning them not
| Parler.
| kube-system wrote:
| Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are a clear example of the
| latter group in my previous comment.
| axaxs wrote:
| It is -very- partisan, and equivalent to poking a wasp nest
| with a stick.
|
| The country is very, very divided, not just between D vs R but
| also progressive vs...everyone else.
|
| I wish I had the answers(surprise, I don't), but I feel we
| should find some commonality, some give and take, and get on a
| path toward a semblance of unity. Trying to silence your
| opposition is what I'd call the complete opposite of that
| approach.
| r00fus wrote:
| Hmm - 4 years of an administration doing exactly what you're
| describing (silencing opposition viewpoints) and now it's all
| unity and kumbayah?
|
| Your post is quite ironic.
| axaxs wrote:
| Why do people get so defensive when 'their side' is
| questioned? Is your solution to forever go back and forth
| silencing each other because the other guys did it first?
|
| I am not picking sides. I think it's unprofessional for the
| president to constantly call things like 'Fake News', but I
| don't remember them going to cable companies to try and get
| them canceled. And if they did, I oppose that just the
| same.
|
| Personally, I got so sick of all news being all Trump all
| the time, I question any claim that media was in any way
| silenced.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Obama did far more to silence opposing viewpoints than
| Trump did. But you probably don't know about what Obama
| did, because his administration's intimidation and jailing
| of reporters worked.
|
| How many reporters did the Trump administration throw in
| jail?
| r00fus wrote:
| Do you have a cite for the Obama reference? Quick google
| search says it's BS. Whereas Trump did recently threaten
| a reporter with jail time.
| avesi wrote:
| Michael Hastings mysteriously exploded during the Obama
| Administration, maybe that's what they're referring to.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Actually, 12 years
| hpcjoe wrote:
| I think the only way to handle this is to stand up for common
| sense, and call out those attempting to use 1984 as a
| playbook. To shine the disinfecting light of day upon things
| like this. To vote the idiots who push this crap, out.
|
| This could be making sure you primary them, recall them, or
| elect other persons. Seriously, allegiance to political
| parties is not what I am looking for in my elected reps. I
| want them to work on behalf of _me_. Not their particular
| party label.
|
| The damage that the two parties fighting for political power
| have done to this country is ... staggering.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| -> I want them to work on behalf of _me_.
|
| Sorry pal, _Citizens United_ screwed up any chances of
| that.
| hpcjoe wrote:
| I agree it had a part in it, but its not the whole story.
| Its the citizens being unable to elect people not
| beholden to political parties, with party obligations.
| These obligations appear to be more important than their
| obligations to the people who put them there.
|
| This isn't a Citizen's United issue as much as it is a
| set of political parties that have evolved to control
| their captive populations. Some people vote D|R precisely
| to stick it to the others. They don't care about
| representation. They care about tribalism. The parties
| foster and encourage that thinking. The various "news"
| channels have their own opinions and often align with a
| particular party. Which means they are in the propaganda
| and red meat business. Not the news business.
|
| CU is a part of this, in terms of providing fuel for the
| fire, but its been going on much longer than CU, and will
| continue regardless of whether or not CU gets struck down
| going forward.
| ntsplnkv2 wrote:
| Yep, the partisanship is absolutely insane, far worse than
| in years past.
|
| The problem is now moderates are getting forced to join
| sides - which leads to even more polarizing candidates.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Just elect some _honest_ politicians and they 'll be morally
| capable of fighting 'misinformation'.
|
| Still waiting for a possible world like that to exist.
| [deleted]
| SllX wrote:
| Yes.
| tanylak wrote:
| Extremely
| surge wrote:
| It pretty much is and is a chilling attempt at limiting speech.
| Free press, is free press. CNN and MSNBC both spread their
| share of misinformation. You need to be able to watch multiple
| news sources with different takes in a free society, to
| determine whose wrong or whose omitting key facts in an attempt
| to frame the news.
| ineptech wrote:
| How is asking Fox for viewership numbers, "a chilling attempt
| at limiting speech"?
| LanceH wrote:
| It's a legislative body which is trying to limit speech not
| through legislation but through intimidation. They could
| pass a law and have it struck down nearly immediately, or
| they could flog CEO's in public for their own amusement.
| ineptech wrote:
| Huh? How is this intimidation? It's not like spreading
| information to its viewers is something Fox was doing
| illegally or surreptitiously; it's their whole business.
| However many people they reached, I would think they'd be
| proud of the answer?
| Alupis wrote:
| > It's a legislative body which is trying to limit speech
| not through legislation but through intimidation
|
| Bingo!
|
| When these CEO's enact new policies that censors "Right-
| Think", it'll be totally okay because it's not the
| Government limiting Free Speech - private companies are
| allowed to limit Free Speech, don't you see!
| jodrellblank wrote:
| That isn't what "free speech" means. Free Speech means
| the government won't imprison or execute you. Private
| companies operate private services, they can kick you off
| for saying "bread" if they want and it's not "limiting
| free speech".
| Alupis wrote:
| You see the issue here then, right?
|
| Government cannot limit your Free Speech, for the reason
| I (and you) pointed out.
|
| So... short of any alternative tools, the Government sets
| out to intimidate private companies into censoring on the
| Government's behalf.
|
| What more... it's not "The Government" - it's a political
| party that happens to be in power right now and is
| seeking to censor the other political party through means
| of intimidation and coercion of private companies.
|
| That doesn't sit very well with me.. regardless of which
| party is attempting to censor which.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| You're deliberately mixing "Twitter bans me" with
| "Government imprisons me" and pretending they are the
| same thing so you can describe it as " _private companies
| are allowed to limit free speech don 't you see!_" which
| is a misleading and incorrect description. You said "
| _When these CEO 's enact new policies that censors
| "Right-Think", it'll be totally okay because it's not the
| Government limiting Free Speech - private companies are
| allowed to limit Free Speech, don't you see!_" and that
| is explicitly /not/ what limiting free speech means; a)
| that's not the Government limiting Free Speech, that's
| the Government doing something else, and b) a private
| company limiting your speech isn't a private company
| limiting Free Speech, it's a private company doing
| something else.
|
| And Free Speech is too important for that equivocation to
| pass uncontested.
|
| > " _Government cannot limit your Free Speech, for the
| reason I (and you) pointed out._ "
|
| I didn't point out a reason the Government cannot limit
| free speech, I pointed out that Twitter banning you is
| not _anyone_ limiting Free Speech. The Government
| absolutely /can/ limit your Free Speech, that's why it's
| important and scary - of all organizations which exist
| only the Government can make it illegal for you to
| publish a book or imprison you for writing a critical
| newspaper article. Jeff Bezos cannot lock you up for
| writing a blog post critical of Amazon or making a
| credible bomb threat, but a government could
| (potentially) lock you up for writing a blog post
| critical of the government and can do so for making a
| credible bomb threat.
|
| Your reason appears to be "the Government doesn't want to
| limit your Free Speech because it would make them look
| bad, so they lean on Twitter to ban people instead" -
| well I would far far prefer that, because having your
| Twitter account banned is less bad than being imprisoned,
| and more easily recovered from by posting somewhere else.
| You trying to claim this is limiting your Free Speech
| trivialises what it means for people in other countries
| to be imprisoned for being critical of the party in power
| (whether you call that a government or not).
|
| > " _What more... it 's not "The Government" - it's a
| political party that happens to be in power right now_"
|
| That's what a government is.
|
| > " _and is seeking to censor the other political party
| through means of intimidation and coercion of private
| companies._
|
| Again no; Twitter banning your account is a kind of
| censorship but not the same kind of censorship, even if
| they were paid by the President himself. You being
| arrested for having a Twitter account would be
| censorship, but it wouldn't be Twitter doing the
| arresting. The reason it's not (the same kind of / as
| bad) censorship is that you can make your own Twitter
| with blackjack and hookers and say "I love
| $politicalParty" all you like on it, and if everyone does
| that then Twitter fades into irrelevance. Just because
| Twitter is large and popular doesn't mean Twitter is
| obliged to provide service to everyone - subject to
| discrimination laws. If you phone up your local talk
| radio and they don't air your phonecall, that's not
| censorship.
| LanceH wrote:
| Twitter banning an account at the behest of the
| government is absolutely censorship. Sure Twitter is free
| to ban me. But Twitter is free to allow me to speak
| without retribution from the government.
|
| The government has no business threatening companies to
| silence people.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Trying to head off this response is why I added "(the
| same kind of / as bad) censorship". The government has no
| business threatening companies to silence people, but if
| they do threaten companies to silence people that's not
| the same as arresting you for criticising the government,
| it's not the same thing as limiting Free Speech(tm).
| Twitter is free to allow you to speak without retribution
| from the government, but _compelling_ Twitter to let you
| speak, to provide you a service you aren 't paying for,
| is another matter again.
|
| Where the lines fall on that is up for debate, in
| arguments about whether large enough sites are like
| public services, or should be public services, whether
| websites are blind conduits for information or
| responsible for the content on them, and the fact that
| all that is being argued is evidence that it hasn't been
| settled in a dystopian way.
|
| If I threw $10 to ICQ to delete your account that you
| haven't used in a decade, you could still argue
| "censorship! you have no business doing that!" and be
| correct, but any point about it being a limit on your
| free speech would be much much more obviously weak.
| Alupis wrote:
| You seem to be stuffing a lot of straw men into your
| response. That, or you think I'm making an argument that
| I have yet to write.
|
| I have no idea where Twitter came into all this, nor does
| it matter what people in other countries consider "Free
| Speech" or not.
|
| > The Government absolutely /can/ limit your Free Speech,
| that's why it's important and scary - of all
| organizations which exist only the Government can make it
| illegal for you to publish a book or imprison you for
| writing a critical newspaper article.
|
| Perhaps you are not familiar with the US Constitution and
| the US Government (we often forget HN is an international
| community) - but no, the Government here cannot make it
| illegal to publish a book or imprison you for writing a
| critical newspaper article.
|
| No, the US Government (local, state, federal) cannot put
| you in prison for voicing opinions, no matter how
| unpopular they may be.
|
| Yes, private organization can deplatform, censor, and
| silence any opinions they disagree with.
|
| What we _clearly_ have here is a case of a political
| party, in control of Congress, seeking a way to
| circumvent the US Constitution (specifically the 1st
| Amendment) by nakedly intimidating private organizations
| into enacting censorship on their behalf, to be
| perpetrated against said political party 's political
| enemies.
|
| That is flatly wrong, and _should_ be viewed as
| Government attempting to censor political enemies...
| because that is what it is!
|
| Straw Men be damned...
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| Look at the list. It's pretty much a right-wing only list.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Pretty much? The farthest left that list goes is Fox
| News.
| colpabar wrote:
| Would you feel the same way if house republicans sent
| letters to twitter asking how many users used the #blm
| hashtag last summer? It seems to me that we'd get lots of
| headlines declaring that they were attempting to silence
| anyone in favor of police reform.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| It may be. The key is whether the misinformation present
| directed others to inciting or producing imminent lawless
| action and is likely to incite or produce such action, and I
| think it hinges on how people reacted to the misinformation.
|
| CNN/MSNBC may also have misinformation, but their
| misinformation may not be in the same class, specifically
| something that could motivate some subset of their viewers to
| commit insurrection by attempting to detain and possibly
| murder elected representatives.
|
| In either case, it'll be interesting to see where this goes.
|
| Edited based on feedback.
| zests wrote:
| You can compare yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre to a
| lot of speech, for example, speech that is against a
| military draft. This was the original comparison.
|
| Luckily we (the United States) prevent our government from
| restricting this type of speech.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| Like bhupy pointed out above, is the misinformation
| present directed to inciting or producing imminent
| lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such
| action?
|
| If a speech against the draft incites some subset of
| those who were present to insurrection, with the intent
| to detain and possibly murder elected officials, then it
| may not be protected as free speech.
| [deleted]
| bhupy wrote:
| > To me, it could also be the modern day version of yelling
| "Fire!" in a crowded theater, and I think it hinges on how
| people reacted to the misinformation.
|
| That legal argument has been overturned precisely because
| it has no real limiting principle:
| https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-
| tim...
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| While it's not the best, people are familiar with it. The
| replacement is certainly more accurate.
|
| In this case, is the misinformation present directed to
| inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is
| likely to incite or produce such action?
| bhupy wrote:
| > In this case, is the misinformation present directed to
| inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is
| likely to incite or produce such action?
|
| We have several Supreme Court decisions that can help
| answer this question. First of all, misinformation was
| established to be protected speech in NYTimes vs
| Sullivan, where the SCOTUS unanimously found that the New
| York Times was within its rights to publish an
| advertisement containing factual inaccuracies[1].
|
| Brandenburg v Ohio (also unanimous[2]) explicitly
| established the "imminent lawless action" test as
| overriding the "clear and present danger" test; which was
| further reinforced by Hess v Indiana in which the court
| found that Hess's words were protected by the First
| Amendment because his speech amounted to "nothing more
| than the advocacy of illegal action at some indefinite
| future time"; i.e. failing the "imminence" portion of the
| "imminent lawless action" test [3].
|
| > While it's not the best, people are familiar with it.
| The replacement is certainly more accurate.
|
| The entire point is that what people are familiar with is
| incorrect and should no longer be considered a valid
| argument. In fact, the irony of this logic is that one
| could argue that advocating for limiting speech by
| falsely citing an overturned precedent as currently
| relevant is itself misinformation that can be legally
| regulated even under the First Amendment; we would both
| agree that that is nonsense.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._S
| ullivan
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hess_v._Indiana
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| We do, for individuals, in specific situations. Like I
| stated in my comment above, I'm not certain those would
| apply in this case.
| bhupy wrote:
| The New York Times vs Sullivan precedent pretty
| specifically addressed that issue: organizations (like
| the NYT) are protected by the First Amendment.
|
| Also, just taking a step back, the Constitution makes no
| mention of a difference between individuals and groups.
| If you and I were to group together to advocate for
| something, our rights to advocate for that thing don't
| magically disappear.
|
| In fact, by this logic, we don't actually have a free
| press, because journalistic outlets aren't individuals,
| they are organizations that the Constitution doesn't
| protect.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| The New York Times vs Sullivan precedent does, in terms
| of defamation. That may not apply in other situations,
| specifically in federal crimes.
|
| The Constitution may not differentiate between
| individuals and other entities, but the courts have
| differentiated between them. They may not in this case,
| but I wouldn't assume they would either.
|
| They also differentiate based on other facts, which may
| differentiate any future cases. We definitely have
| freedom of the press, as it relates to defamation, and
| parody, but the precedent established in those cases may
| not apply to a case involving criminal acts.
| bhupy wrote:
| > The Constitution may not differentiate between
| individuals and other entities, but the courts have
| differentiated between them.
|
| When? To my knowledge, there are no major landmark
| decisions which hold that an association of individuals
| may be treated differently from individuals; especially
| as it relates to the First Amendment. We even have a
| precedent in Citizens United v FEC which reinforces the
| consistency between individuals and organizations under
| First Amendment jurisprudence.
|
| > We definitely have freedom of the press, as it relates
| to defamation, and parody, but the precedent established
| in those cases may not apply to a case involving criminal
| acts.
|
| The established cases also include criminal acts, as was
| the case when the Ku Klux Klan advocated for (criminal)
| violence. The courts have held that even advocating for
| illegal acts at some time in the future is protected
| (Hess).
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| There's nothing I know of that applies to the First
| Amendment, but there are many examples where individuals
| and organizations, or even organizations in different
| levels of government, are held to different standards
| under the law. The standards for HOAs versus local
| government is a good example. Some states require that
| HOAs enforce code equally, but will permit local
| government to enforce it unequally because local
| government has relatively limited resources.
|
| The court may consider a media corporation to be
| identical to an individual in terms of First Amendment
| cases, but I wouldn't be certain about that.
|
| The established cases do include criminal acts, but those
| were challenged based on the unconstitutionality of state
| law, and were in different crcumstances. If DT were
| charged with inciting a riot by the District of Columbia,
| then Hess is great precedent, but I don't think it would
| be great in a government case against a media
| corporation. The government likely wouldn't bring
| criminal charges against a specific individual either,
| which changes things. If they seek monetary damages and
| an injunction, or even just an injunction, the precedent
| used in Hess may not apply.
| mindslight wrote:
| The New York Times is a corporation with a government-
| granted charter that grants it things like limited
| liability. It's fallacious to characterize it as just
| some ad-hoc "group" of individuals joining together to
| individually exercise their rights.
|
| And yes, I agree that we don't actually have a free
| press. Given our microkernel government, institutions
| like the New York Times are better seen as part of the de
| facto government than independent organizations speaking
| truth to power - eg marketing the Iraq war. This
| relationship is easier to see with say Equifax than NYT,
| but the dynamic is similar.
| bhupy wrote:
| > It's fallacious to characterize it as just some ad-hoc
| "group" of individuals joining together to individually
| exercise their rights.
|
| Nobody is arguing that the New York Times is some ad-hoc
| group of individuals; it certainly has its structure. The
| argument is that the same principles that afford an ad-
| hoc group of individuals the freedom of association (and
| expression) is what also affords a structured corporation
| like the New York Times the same protections. This isn't
| conjecture, it's the philosophy behind the landmark
| decisions of New York Times Co vs Sullivan, as well as
| Citizens United vs FEC (Citizens United was a 501(c)4
| non-profit corporation).
|
| At the end of the day, the New York Times doesn't have a
| mind of its own; the articles it publishes and
| advertisements it chooses to sell are the output of the
| individuals that work there, including the journalists
| and the editors.
|
| If you and I want to join together and start a
| corporation for the purpose of advancing an issue, the
| First Amendment prohibits the government from enacting
| any law that may abridge that.
|
| > And yes, I agree that we don't actually have a free
| press.
|
| The Supreme Court has an established track record of
| aggressively protecting the rights of the organized press
| (NYT v Sullivan, Hustler Magazine v Falwell), group-
| speech (Citizens United), hate speech (Brandenburg) and
| even violent speech (Hess v Indiana). If that doesn't
| register as "press freedom", then I may as well lobby for
| legislation outlawing comments like yours on account of
| being misinformation.
| mindslight wrote:
| > _At the end of the day, the New York Times doesn 't
| have a mind of its own; the articles it publishes are the
| output of the individuals that work there, including the
| journalists and the editors._
|
| The Chinese room argument says otherwise, and it behooves
| us as _homo sapiens_ to pay attention. How many
| individual reporters at the NYT wanted to give support
| the Iraq war? And yet that 's what the entity itself
| ended up doing, using their contributions.
|
| > _Supreme Court has an established track record of
| aggressively protecting the rights of the organized
| press_
|
| You totally ignored my argument. The point is that most
| of what constitutes de facto government in the US is
| actually outside of what we call "the government", and
| resides in corporations. Hence pointing to Equifax, which
| explicitly promulgates constraints on our individual
| behavior, and yet has escaped all sort of democratic
| accountability.
| bhupy wrote:
| > The Chinese room argument says otherwise, and it
| behooves us as homo sapiens to pay attention.
|
| I'm not sure what this sentence means.
|
| > > How many individual reporters at the NYT wanted to
| give support the Iraq war? And yet that's what the entity
| itself ended up doing, using their contributions.
|
| I'm sure that individual NYT reporters disagreed with
| support for the Iraq War; but as a protected association,
| they are free to determine how they settle internal
| disagreements however they see fit. Every organization,
| group, corporation, and association has their set of
| internal rules, and the Constitution protects those
| associations _specifically as it relates to speech and
| expression_.
|
| > Hence pointing to Equifax, which explicitly promulgates
| constraints on our individual behavior, and yet has
| escaped all sort of democratic accountability.
|
| Not sure how Equifax is relevant. First of all, it isn't
| in the business of publishing speech; that's what we're
| talking about here. If Equifax wrote a blog post about
| how it should be free from legislation, it is well within
| its rights to do that. Second of all, if you're talking
| about Equifax's business practices, the user has no
| control over whether they interact with Equifax or not --
| THAT is the problem with Equifax. That's simply not true
| for Fox News or CNN or The New York Times where there's a
| direct relationship between seller and buyer. I'm not
| sure what Equifax has to do with any of this...
| sneak wrote:
| Important to remember that corporations, like all groups,
| have no mouths, no hands, and cannot act.
|
| All corporate actions, all corporate speech, is carried
| out by individual humans. Group rights are individual
| human rights, as groups have no brain and cannot act.
| mindslight wrote:
| Except that there is a distinction between an individual
| performing an action of their own volition, and an
| individual performing an action to obtain income. The
| first represents the true will of the individual, while
| the latter only requires their desire to have a roof over
| their head.
|
| And as I said, the entity of the NYT _is_ afforded
| protections that individuals are not. If individual
| rights are supremely important to the individuals making
| up the NYT, the individuals involved are still free to
| act outside of their corporate shell.
| bhupy wrote:
| New York Times employees are employed at-will. We're not
| talking about minimum wage workers publishing content
| under duress here, we're talking about journalists and
| editors who generally join organizations they believe in.
|
| Tucker Carlson doesn't go on air and say the things he
| says because he's forced to, he does it because he
| _wants_ to.
|
| Full disclosure: my wife works for the New York Times.
| mindslight wrote:
| So your wife never complains that work is pushing her to
| do something that she does not want to do, and she's
| _bargaining_ with management to try to do the right
| thing? And the transaction costs to her quitting and
| finding a new job are zero? IMO "at will" is only 99%
| correct, and the integral of its remainder builds up into
| some gross misbehavior.
| bhupy wrote:
| My wife has never been forced to publish anything against
| her will. That being said, she has disagreed with the
| editorial decisions of the paper on a number of
| occasions. This is not at odds with the freedom of
| association; every single organization is comprised of
| individuals that don't always agree with one another, but
| work together to overcome their disagreements. Nowhere
| has there ever been a guarantee that the freedom of
| association presupposes that every individual has the
| freedom to confer the exact same set of opinions to
| everyone in their association. Importantly, my wife
| doesn't feel like she's entitled to the power to censure
| other journalists or employees in her company. I know
| that I don't have the power to do that in my own company,
| nor should I.
|
| There's disagreement within every group, that doesn't
| render the concept of free association invalid. The
| Catholic Church has its disagreements, but that doesn't
| mean that they lose the freedom to congregate because
| they're somehow no longer a bona fide association on
| account of that internal disagreement. The Democratic
| Party has its disagreements (heaven knows), the
| Republican Party is essentially at war with itself, the
| Libertarian Party can never agree on what it stands for
| because it's a motley crew of weirdos. None of this
| matters, they are all protected by the First Amendment,
| _as associations_. Whether they are traded on the NYSE,
| or they are 501(c)4 non-profit corporations, or they are
| just an amateur club, they are protected by the same
| First Amendment, and are subject to the same narrow
| limits on speech established by Brandenburg v Ohio (and
| all other relevant precedents).
|
| Obviously the transaction cost to quitting and finding a
| new job is not zero; the Constitution's protection of the
| freedom of association has no guarantees on what the
| transaction cost to associate are. Just like free speech,
| you're free to say whatever you want, but you're not
| entitled to a free platform; promulgating speech costs
| money. You're free to keep and bear arms, but you're not
| entitled to a free rifle; guns cost money.
|
| Associations are more than capable of gross misbehavior;
| but in manners related specifically to the publishing of
| speech and expression, they enjoy outsized protection, at
| least in the United States.
| mindslight wrote:
| >> _The Chinese room argument says otherwise, and it
| behooves us as homo sapiens to pay attention._
|
| > _I 'm not sure what this sentence means._
|
| I really should have said the implication of the Chinese
| Room thought experiment - intelligence arises from the
| constructive behavior of systems, distinct from their
| mechanical execution. As a (presumed) homo sapien, you
| should be interested in maintaining the existence of our
| own species versus entities that could subjugate us.
|
| You keep asserting that organizations are no different
| from individuals, while completely ignoring every way
| I've pointed out how organizations differ from
| individuals. So I don't see how it's particularly
| productive to continue - you've seemingly made up your
| mind that desirable small-scale behavior implies
| desirable large-scale behavior _by construction_ , and
| ignoring emergent behavior that arises out of scale.
| bhupy wrote:
| > You keep asserting that organizations are no different
| from individuals, while completely ignoring every way
| I've pointed out how organizations differ from
| individuals.
|
| I'm asserting that organizations are no different from
| individuals _in the eyes of the law_. That 's what we're
| talking about here. The law explicitly protects the
| freedom to associate, and has no point of view on what
| the size of a valid association should be.
|
| > you've seemingly made up your mind that desirable
| small-scale behavior implies desirable large-scale
| behavior by construction, and ignoring emergent behavior
| that arises out of scale.
|
| If you go back and read my comments, I've not once made
| any prescriptions of what is "desirable" or what "should"
| be; I am strictly making descriptive statements about
| what currently "is" based on the (very accessible) text
| of the Constitution and the relevant precedents. You
| might be correct that large-scale group behavior is
| somehow undesirable -- I don't have an opinion about that
| and might even agree with you! My point is that it
| doesn't matter, under the law. A group of 10 is protected
| the same way a group of 1000 or 10,000,000 are. As it
| currently stands, if you or I were a part of an
| organization, neither you nor I have any entitlement over
| how that organization chooses to officially express
| itself to the public, unless that organization explicitly
| empowered us to be able to do so.
|
| If you think that the law _should_ afford us the power to
| prevent the organization that we are a part of from
| expressing itself (even if we are in the minority within
| that organization) or if you think that the law _should_
| have carve-outs for different sized groups, that 's a
| separate argument and discussion, and your best course of
| action there is to amend the US Constitution. We are
| currently talking about the legal merits of the Federal
| Legislature intimidating or hypothetically legislating
| news outlets for the content of their published speech
| under the status quo of the US Constitution.
| mindslight wrote:
| > _If you go back and read my comments, I 've not once
| made any prescriptions of what is "desirable" or what
| "should" be; I am strictly making descriptive statements
| about what currently "is"_
|
| When talking about ideals and values, the wider context
| is _what should be_. Explaining the current law and its
| current application is straightforward, and isn 't
| particularly worthwhile without a larger point. I don't
| see where your comments disclaim that you're only
| describing the current legal interpretation as opposed to
| physical reality or how things ought to be, which means
| that you're advocating for the status quo.
|
| But sure, taking your comments as pure factual
| description of the legal situation - thanks for
| explaining the rationale leading to part of the problem
| of corporate entities becoming emergently unaccountable
| to us humans. If you'd care to discuss the problems with
| this, please go back and read my previous comments in
| their intended framework.
| bhupy wrote:
| > which means that you're advocating for the status quo
|
| I'm actually not advocating for anything. I'm using this
| conversation to understand what you're advocating for so
| that I can form my own opinion about what I should
| believe.
|
| Looking back at this conversation, you said "I agree that
| we don't actually have a free press". It's clear from
| this conversation that you understand that in the status
| quo, we actually _do_ have a free press, it 's just that
| you find the implications of that to be undesirable; and
| you've made your best case for why that is.
|
| My goal is to get you to be up front about the
| ramifications of your own proposal by admitting on the
| public record that you don't think that we ought to have
| a "free press". That helps me not only understand the
| implications of your proposal but also establish that you
| actually do believe in what you're advocating for despite
| the implications. It also allows me to understand what it
| really means to deviate from the status quo. In that
| regard, this was an illuminating exchange.
|
| To the extent that I'm advocating for anything, it's that
| if you want to make any fundamental changes to the nature
| of press freedom in the US, the best way to do that is
| via the Constitutional Amendment process, and not by
| Legislative bullying. Even if one were to agree with the
| ends for which you are advocating (not saying that I do),
| I definitely disagree with the current means of achieving
| them.
| NoodleIncident wrote:
| > "nothing more than the advocacy of illegal action at
| some indefinite future time"
|
| So for this case, since there was a definite future time,
| it would indeed be imminent?
| rayiner wrote:
| "Incitement" and "imminent lawless action" are _extremely
| narrow_ compared to what people are talking about here:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
|
| Even openly advocating violence is protected by the first
| amendment under the Supreme Court's _Brandenburg_
| decision.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| They are narrowly interpreted as it relates to
| individuals, but I'm not sure that same interpretation
| would be applied to media outlets.
|
| In terms of liability, as a property owner I have a much
| lower standards for care, custody, and control of an
| empty piece of property I have with a no trespassing sign
| than a corporation has for a sports stadium they run. I'm
| not certain that the standards for free speech by an
| individual in a single instance would be the same as the
| standards for a large media corporation across multiple
| instances.
|
| How narrowly the court interprets "incitement" and
| "imminent lawless action" may be a function of the entity
| making them. An individual who is making political speech
| could say something that is considered protected, while a
| large corporation saying the same thing repeatedly, in a
| different context, may not be protected in the same way.
| rayiner wrote:
| While the Supreme Court has not specifically ruled on
| incitement in the context of media outlets, it's clear
| from cases like _New York Times v. Sullivan_ and _Hustler
| Magazine v. Falwell_ that the Supreme Court is extremely
| protective of speech by media outlets.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| They are, in civil cases involving defamation and parody.
| I don't think a case involving any of the media outlets
| who are spreading misinformation about the election that
| could be related to federal crimes would be based on
| either of those.
| hogFeast wrote:
| When you think people disagree with you because they are
| evil, any action is justfiable (internally).
| TrispusAttucks wrote:
| It's even worse when you think people are evil simply
| because they disagree with you!
| protonfish wrote:
| What's even worse is when people are evil and nobody
| fights against them while they overthrow your government
| and commit genocide.
| wdn wrote:
| You should see how upset people were when you told them
| you think Trump is a great president. At my last job, the
| IT admin was so upset that he told me that he will not do
| any of my incidents.
|
| No discussion what so ever.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| That's unfortunate that he chose to respond that way.
|
| I might disagree with you on Trump but I think we
| probably have far more in common than we disagree on. I
| don't know how anyone thinks we're going to solve our
| real problems if we can't have constructive conversations
| about where we agree and disagree, and how we can both
| compromise to work toward what is probably a shared goal.
|
| I believe most Americans have the same basic goals: good
| health, prosperity, security, and strong community. Most
| of where we disagree is around how to achieve those
| goals. Unfortunately, too many people get caught up in
| the "how" and that it makes it so much harder to get
| anything done.
| brighton36 wrote:
| There's nothing more just than vengeance.
| teddyh wrote:
| " _Vengeance is at the core of many of the world 's most
| enduring and moronic conflicts._"
|
| -- http://tailsteak.com/archive.php?num=275
| minikites wrote:
| Apparently moves like this are only "nakedly partisan" when
| Democrats do it, but it's fine when Republicans withhold aid
| from Democratic states.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads further into political flamewar.
| Admittedly the GP pointed that way, but there's a difference
| between pointing and going there--and there are other reasons
| besides outright battle why one might want to talk about
| partisanship in this context.
|
| The goal of HN threads is to be curious conversation; that
| tends to require not burning alive. So far this thread is
| mostly managing to stay on the good side of the line.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| pfortuny wrote:
| From "how many people" to "what people" there is only a single
| step.
|
| And it is very very very easy to take it.
|
| That a congressperson makes this kind of question speaks
| volumes about him. _Unbelievable_.
| ineptech wrote:
| "Gosh, that's only one step away from something worse" is
| true of _literally everything anyone has ever done_.
| hpcjoe wrote:
| I know I'll be downvoted for this, but fundamentally this
| definition[1] includes "and forcible suppression of
| opposition". In what way is this letter not the first step in
| this direction?
|
| I'm no fan of the previous president. Really didn't like him.
| But this ... this attempt at shutting down of opposition
| communication, is the hallmark, the signature of nascent
| oppression. And a slide into fascism/socialism/etc.
|
| [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fascism
| pfortuny wrote:
| Saying that you will be downvoted guarantees it.
|
| You are right but it is best not to mention the beast, in
| my opinion.
| hpcjoe wrote:
| Until we confront this, without fabricating fever swamp
| fiction to frighten captive tribal masses, we are going
| to be stuck in this dystopia. Teetering on the edge of
| {fasc,Democratic|National social}ism who all seek to
| control the narrative and suppress dissent.
| helen___keller wrote:
| > Does this strike anyone else as a nakedly partisan move?
|
| Of course, this entire letter is published by two democratic
| representatives from highly liberal districts (silicon valley
| and stockton) who want to pander to their base. There's nothing
| actionable or productive about this letter.
|
| Somehow we still have reactions in this thread on the scale of
| "we're on our way to a one-party state". This is just Congress
| doing what they do most every day (setting up for reelection)
| gotoeleven wrote:
| Remember when republicans sent a letter to cable providers asking
| them how many viewers watched MSNBC for russia conspiracy
| theories or context-free coverage of the recent police shootings
| or sympathetic coverage of people burning down police stations
| and declaring autonomous zones or the breathless reporting about
| "kids in cages" and everyone thought that was totally cool?
| cassalian wrote:
| Remember when the left said they wanted to unify the country? I
| guess squashing all opposing viewpoints is one way to do that...
| Maybe they should get some help from Russia and China, I hear
| they have a lot of experience in dealing with 'misinformation'
| runlevel1 wrote:
| There is no such demand in the PDF linked.
|
| EDIT: In case the title gets changed, it is currently "House
| Democrats Demand Cable Providers to Censor Misinformation [PDF]"
|
| EDIT 2: After all the downvotes, I looked again but still am not
| seeing it.
| dd36 wrote:
| Why are you being downvoted? I don't see it either.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| This is correct. There is no per-se demand, but there is a
| strong suggestion of expectation that these networks should be
| exerting some kind of pressure against the misinformation in
| shows they carry.
|
| Frankly it still seems pretty ridiculous to me.
| sleepysysadmin wrote:
| >This is correct. There is no per-se demand, but there is a
| strong suggestion of expectation that these networks should
| be exerting some kind of pressure against the misinformation
| in shows they carry.
|
| It's kind of interesting. In 1 reading you can say there's no
| demand but when I read it there's multiple demands from the
| federal government.
|
| It's similar to Trump and inciting violence. In 1 reading you
| can say Trump never incited violence but when I read Trumps'
| words he incited violence.
|
| The democrat government absolutely demanded right-wing media
| be removed from their platform.
| garg wrote:
| Who do you think should exert pressure against networks that
| broadcast misinformation and propaganda to millions of
| people?
| jolux wrote:
| If anybody, it should be the public, not the government,
| from the perspective of constitutional law. In an ethical
| sense, I'm less sure, because I feel pretty certain that
| the networks named in these letters are harmful to the
| country and harmful to democracy, but I'm unsure about the
| relative costs in the long-term of government intervention
| here. The ruling party attacking opposition media is never
| a good look, no matter how toxic said media is.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| This is the United States - the government is the public.
| jolux wrote:
| That's not really the case. The government is accountable
| to the public, but it also has the power to conceal
| things from the public, and take unilateral action in the
| case of the executive branch.
|
| What I mean by "the public" are individuals cooperating
| to boycott organizations they see as corrosive to
| democracy, which is the typical solution for problems
| like this. The government is expressly and pretty
| strongly forbidden from regulating speech by our
| constitution, which is the mechanism by which the
| government is accountable to the people.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| I tend to disagree with the notion that this letter is
| chilling on free speech. There is a difference between
| criticism of _this_ government and agitprop designed to
| undermine the _system_ of government. The 1A is designed
| to prevent the former, and this letter seems pretty
| clearly designed to fish for that latter.
|
| I think it's a bad letter because Congress is trying to
| abrogate their responsibilities and act like this is
| AT&T's problem, when it isn't. They need to break up the
| monopolies and give people the tools to hold these
| businesses accountable, as you said.
| jolux wrote:
| >There is a difference between criticism of this
| government and agitprop designed to undermine the system
| of government. The 1A is designed to prevent the former,
| and this letter seems pretty clearly designed to fish for
| that latter.
|
| I mostly agree on the merits, but arguing this point is
| difficult because regardless of what the 1A was
| _designed_ to do, at this point its legal interpretation
| has become broad enough that it 's hard to imagine the
| government having a legitimate role in regulating speech
| here. The framers don't seem to have foreseen a crisis
| like we face.
|
| >I think it's a bad letter because Congress is trying to
| abrogate their responsibilities and act like this is
| AT&T's problem, when it isn't. They need to break up the
| monopolies and give people the tools to hold these
| businesses accountable, as you said.
|
| Yes, the effect that the cable companies have on the
| television market makes it very difficult for individuals
| to take effective action against these organizations. I
| think Congress should be investigating antitrust action
| against the cable companies, but these don't seem to be
| bad questions to asking them while they still make up a
| monopoly.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| The submitted title was "House Democrats Demand Cable Providers
| to Censor Misinformation [pdf]". That broke the site guidelines
| by editorializing. We've changed it now to something that is
| hopefully more accurate.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| temp8964 wrote:
| " 4. What steps did you take prior to, on, and following the
| November 3, 2020 elections and the January 6, 2021 attacks to
| monitor, respond to, and reduce the spread of disinformation,
| including encouragement or incitement of violence by channels
| your company disseminates to millions of Americans? Please
| describe each step that you took and when it was taken.
|
| 5. Have you taken any adverse actions against a channel,
| including Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN, for using your platform
| to disseminate disinformation related directly or indirectly to
| the November 3, 2020 elections, the January 6, 2021 Capitol
| insurrection, or COVID-19 misinformation? If yes, please
| describe each action, when it was taken, and the parties
| involved.
|
| 6. Have you ever taken any actions against a channel for using
| your platform to disseminate any disinformation? If yes, please
| describe each action and when it was taken.
|
| 7. Are you planning to continue carrying Fox News, Newsmax, and
| OANN on U-verse, DirecTV, and AT&T TV both now and beyond any
| contract renewal date? If so, why? "
|
| Not seeing it? Really?
| kogus wrote:
| This intimidation is veiled as thinly as the skin of those in
| Congress.
|
| The misinformation and disinformation that is excreted from Fox,
| NewsMax, etc. is not nearly as repugnant as lawmakers who demand
| an explanation from private companies as to why they don't shield
| the innocent ears of voters from the specific version of
| sanitized truth that they'd prefer.
|
| The first amendment forbids Congress from restricting free speech
| by law. It doesn't forbid "pressure" of this sort. But it's worth
| noting that the authors of the first amendment engaged in
| campaigns that made today's "disinformation" look like a
| children's sticker book.[1]
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/08/20/the-dirtie...
| molbioguy wrote:
| These letters are potentially unconstitutional actions. First
| amendment rights can be violated by entities other than the
| government. As pointed out in [1], the government can't induce a
| company to do something that were government to do it would be
| illegal:
|
| _It is "axiomatic," the Supreme Court held in Norwood v.
| Harrison (1973), that the government "may not induce, encourage
| or promote private persons to accomplish what it is
| constitutionally forbidden to accomplish."_
|
| [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/save-the-constitution-from-
| big-...
|
| Edited for grammar and unnecessary qualifiers.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > These letters are are bordering on potentially
| unconstitutional actions.
|
| "bordering on potentially X" is a very misleading way to say
| "not even arguably X".
|
| But that's really all it says.
| molbioguy wrote:
| Thanks. I removed the unnecessary 'bordering on'. The intent
| was to say they're unconstitutional in my view.
| hpcjoe wrote:
| Glad that we aren't deplatforming social/media networks (modern
| day book burning).
|
| Oh. Wait.
| tl wrote:
| Not sure if this qualifies as editorialization, but "Letters from
| [2 California] House Democrats to [Internet and Smart TV Device]
| Providers" is a more accurate title.
| meiji163 wrote:
| ah yes, time to appoint the glorious truth czars.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| While some sources are being chastised for the content they put
| out, it's equally damaging to negligently not put out content on
| other stories. Both sides are doing this pick and choose game of
| politics and bias.
|
| hear about it in the hunter biden case
| here:https://youtu.be/ZnMMx-i971I?t=2481
| yongjik wrote:
| It feels weird to watch all this outrage, when we had four years
| of the president calling the media "fake news", and everybody
| pretty much accepted "Yeah, that's just the way he talks."
|
| Partisanship, partisanship everywhere.
| BooneJS wrote:
| I was hoping this was a request to carry CSPAN in HD.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| Scary stuff, I feel like I'm slowly watching as the U.S turns
| into a one party state, and enforced by the government itself.
|
| We argue about how it's okay for private companies to censor
| whatever they feel like, but what if it's the government
| pressuring them to do so? They themselves in this letter mention
| that 50% of Americans get their news from TV, and many American's
| have one choice of Cable provider, and even if they have 2 or 3,
| that's just 2 or 3 companies you have to pressure into delisting
| news sources of your choosing to make them essentially
| unreachable for the vast majority of the population.
|
| The next step I feel is obviously blocking websites, again
| Americans only have 1 or 2 options of internet providers, and in
| this case they'd already have pressured them into censoring
| cable, so why not ask the same companies to censor the internet?
|
| Steps like this just make me think that one side clearly doesn't
| plan on ever being able to lose an election again, and with
| actions available such as adding new states, adding 12-20 million
| new voters (illegal immigrants), I can see why they feel that
| way. Any authoritarian steps taken in democracy are usually
| balanced by the fact the other side could do the same when in
| power. If you simply never lose power, that's not an issue.
| cozuya wrote:
| Citation to Democrats "wanting to add 12-20 million illegal
| immigrant voters". An outrageous claim.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| Whenever you hear path to citizenship, that does entail
| voting.
|
| [1]https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/16/politics/biden-immigration-
| le...
| mnouquet wrote:
| > We argue about how it's okay for private companies to censor
| whatever they feel like, but what if it's the government
| pressuring them to do so?
|
| Of course, make no mistake, we're about to see plenty of
| legislation entrenching big tech positions !
|
| Also, it's well-know NYT and other media conspired to sell the
| war against Iraq. Even though it was a different
| administration, the same people were in power behind the scene.
| minikites wrote:
| Which party is the "one party" here?
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Probably the one with the presidency, house, senate, most of
| the media, and social media content moderation.
| minikites wrote:
| I just don't understand the parent post, the Democrats want
| MORE people to be able to vote, how is that "planning to
| never lose an election again"? The Republicans are the only
| ones who ever fight to suppress votes, most recently the
| attacks on absentee voting in Georgia, which are a direct
| result of two Democrats winning there and has absolutely
| nothing to do with "illegal immigrants" or election
| security on any level.
|
| Which one sounds more like "planning to never lose an
| election again", the scheme where more people vote or the
| scheme where fewer people vote?
| bpodgursky wrote:
| The point in question is not whether it is justified or
| moral single-party rule. It is whether there is a shift
| towards single-party dominance.
| minikites wrote:
| So how does "more people voting" lead to single-party
| dominance? I only see one party working for that goal,
| and it isn't the Democratic party.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| > I only see one party working for that goal
|
| I mean, that's silly -- any political party would love
| single-party dominance.
|
| Democrats want "more people voting" because their thesis
| is that most disengaged or non-voters would default
| Democrat. It's fine if you believe is that "more people
| voting is good for democracy" but it's not the reason
| that the Democrats are focused on getting more people
| ballots.
| mnouquet wrote:
| > I just don't understand the parent post, the Democrats
| want MORE people to be able to vote
|
| Including dead people ? </sarcasm>
| kodah wrote:
| It's a letter to AT&T that encourages them to do something about
| Fox and OANN. I'd say sure, do something about them, but let's
| also look inward.
|
| There was a lot of misinformation abound after the Capitol Riots
| that was simply there to stir up Democrats and a lot of this
| information was very racially angled. Though Democrats play up
| the death of the Capital police officer now, their constituents
| were absolutely promoting conspiracy theories about the Capitol
| police doing nothing or the FBI intentionally not showing up. I
| won't begin to assess why conspiracy theories were abound when
| literal conspiracy theorists were invading the Capital, that's
| probably worth its own discussion. Put these concepts (racialized
| rhetoric and anti-police conspiracy theories) together and it's
| no wonder why the country broke for another day or two.
|
| If you want to clean up Fox and OANN, I'm down, but let's make
| sure you're cleaning up all the grass roots sources of your
| constituents misinformation too.
| katmannthree wrote:
| Would you be able to give specific examples of left-focused
| misinformation on the capitol riots, that is specific news
| articles from "trusted partisan" sources (CNN, etc) containing
| unsupported conspiracy theories?
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| The fire extinguisher attack turned out to be BS.
|
| https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/capitol-police-
| officers-...
| katmannthree wrote:
| Does that meet the standard for being an unverified
| conspiracy theory? It seems that the story came from a
| source they were keeping anonymous (fairly conventional in
| journalism, especially when reporting things in real time)
| and was promptly updated as more news came in.
|
| It's worth noting that there is fairly extensive video of
| an unhelmeted officer getting hit in the head with a fire
| extinguisher thrown during a brawl. I don't know if that
| officer has been identified as Sicknick or not, but that
| particular event (an officer getting hit in the head with a
| fire extinguisher) did happen. Separately, we know Sicknick
| did physically engage with the rioters, as the official US
| Capitol Police statement cited in the article you linked
| said "Officer Brian D. Sicknick passed away due to injuries
| sustained while on-duty."
|
| So, _a_ fire extinguisher attack did happen (among many
| other attacks on officers during the riot). An officer did
| die as a result of injuries sustained during the riot. An
| anonymous source linked those two events, a link which now
| appears to have been incorrect. News sites which covered
| the events in question have effectively released
| retractions and calls to wait for more evidence.
|
| What more would you want them to do? They can only report
| on the facts as known at the time, and release updates if
| those later change. Both of those things were done.
|
| This is an entirely different situation from Fox and OANN
| alleging massive conspiracies and voter fraud and
| continuing to hold that position for political reasons
| despite a lack of evidence.
| adolph wrote:
| The update clearly shows that a "fact" was not reported
| and what was reported was a rumor that could not be
| verified because it was in no way ever true. I'd expect
| sober reporting to stick to assertions with real
| documentation or multiple unrelated attestations of
| direct knowledge. I'd also expect that a news outlet
| would treat assertions made by police or any organization
| as objectively often false and always self-interested. As
| it stands it is all click-bait manure and the retractions
| are just legal CYA.
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| There is plenty of evidence of voting irregularities. An
| irregularity only becomes fraud when it was done with
| criminal intent.
|
| The overarching issue with normalization of censorship is
| that it becomes difficult to tell when evidence does not
| exist and when it does exist but was censored.
|
| https://hereistheevidence.com/
| bqe wrote:
| That website is not a quality source of information.
| Media Bias/Fact Check rates it as questionable, low
| quality, and far to the right:
| https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/here-is-the-evidence/
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| Mediabiasfactcheck.com Claims that hereistheevidence.com
| is "low quality", because it links to "low quality"
| sources. But Mediabiasfactcheck has links to those same
| sources, so by it's own argument Mediabiasfactcheck is
| "low quality".
|
| Please don't take the above argument too seriously, my
| point is that so many of the fact check orgs are riddled
| with logical fallacies. In this case we have guilt by
| association, ad hominem, argument from authority, and
| appeal to motive.
|
| I think a fact check system that did not rely on logical
| fallacy would be quite useful, however I have yet to find
| one.
| ntsplnkv2 wrote:
| All of the "evidence" here is from sources like the
| Washington Examiner and "The RF angle" Are you kidding
| me?
|
| If you want real evidence of "irregularities" look
| elsewhere, its certainly not here.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| That's a long conclusion to make.
|
| The statement that it had not been determined that blunt
| force trauma specifically caused Officer Sicknick's death
| doesn't make the attack BS - there's video footage of him
| being hit with one. And dying within 24 hours from a
| hemorrhagic stroke is definitely not enough to rule out the
| proximal impact of fire extinguishers and other implements
| used to beat him.
| nyczomg wrote:
| "there's video footage of him being hit with one."
|
| You should forward that video footage to law enforcement
| right away, because they don't even have it. I'll even
| cite CNN, because I assume you believe they are
| trustworthy.
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/02/politics/brian-sicknick-
| charg...
|
| "Investigators are struggling to build a federal murder
| case regarding fallen US Capitol Police officer Brian
| Sicknick, vexed by a lack of evidence that could prove
| someone caused his death as he defended the Capitol
| during last month's insurrection. Authorities have
| reviewed video and photographs that show Sicknick
| engaging with rioters amid the siege but have yet to
| identify a moment in which he suffered his fatal
| injuries, law enforcement officials familiar with the
| matter said. "
|
| "According to one law enforcement official, medical
| examiners did not find signs that the officer sustained
| any blunt force trauma, so investigators believe that
| early reports that he was fatally struck by a fire
| extinguisher are not true."
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| Greenwald has a good write up regarding left-focused
| misinformation. Fire extinguisher, zip ties, firearms, etc.
|
| https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-false-and-
| exaggerated-c...
| ntsplnkv2 wrote:
| This article doesn't disprove much.
|
| Being "pro-trump" doesn't make the death not count. 3 of
| the five died because of the protests - it doesn't matter
| which side. You can argue that a stroke/heart attack may
| not have happened in a non-high pressure environment.
|
| We don't need any more evidence than the mountains of video
| of people storming the capital. It's bad enough as is, it
| could have been far, far worse.
| Clubber wrote:
| The difference between someone dying because of a stroke
| and someone dying because they were bludgeoned to death
| with a blunt object over the course of several minutes
| while thousands of people stood idly by is stark.
| katmannthree wrote:
| Getting bludgeoned can cause strokes, among various other
| more and less pressing medical issues.
|
| It's still murder when the victim dies in the hospital
| instead of at the scene.
| Clubber wrote:
| Yes this is true, but apparently he wasn't actually
| bludgeoned with anything although it was _widely_
| reported that he was. The current theory is chemical
| agents had something to do with it (like pepper or bear
| spray).
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/02/politics/brian-sicknick-
| charg...
|
| >According to one law enforcement official, medical
| examiners did not find signs that the officer sustained
| any blunt force trauma, so investigators believe that
| early reports that he was fatally struck by a fire
| extinguisher are not true.
| JamisonM wrote:
| We've got lots of video of people being bludgeoned that
| day while thousands of people either stood by or
| encouraged it. It seems like the specifics of the
| injuries and their consequences is actually the silly
| thing to be arguing about.
| ntsplnkv2 wrote:
| Of course - but that just makes a bad thing worse.
|
| The capital riots were bad. No amount of far right-wing
| sugar coating is going to change that.
| benjohnson wrote:
| The "five people died!!" narrative.
|
| Three of them were just people dying because walking around
| while not in the best of health. One was an unarmed woman
| shot in the neck by police.
|
| So really.. the rioters can only have rightfully been the
| cause of one death of someone not involved in the riot or
| protest.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| It's much more gray than your presenting. There were numerous
| LEOs amongst the rioters, and many of the early videos people
| were seeing were cops taking selfies with rioters and cops
| standing to one side as the rioters walked in. Meanwhile the
| white House was slow footing any kind of response. The extent
| of the Capitol police resistance want really clear until things
| had settled down.
| croutonwagon wrote:
| Robby Soave had a good take on this
|
| https://reason.com/2021/02/22/eshoo-mcnerney-letter-fox-news...
| cjdrake wrote:
| This seems like a terrible idea.
| asterialite wrote:
| I think the crux of the issue is not freedom of speech, but
| rather determining what counts as harmful disinformation. I
| imagine we all agree that disinformation should be curbed; the
| point of contention is precisely where we should draw the line.
|
| The violent, seditious sentiments present in America today are a
| direct result of people being permitted to pander dangerous lies
| with no consequences, lies which have caused deaths, and will
| cause more. If the GOP had not been able to lie about election
| fraud, the Capitol attack might not have happened.
|
| At the same time, it's hard to draw the line between a mere
| falsehood and a dangerous one. In hindsight we can tell that a
| conspiracy theory claiming that the world is controlled by a
| cabal of Jewish paedophiles with space lasers is dangerous, but
| what about when it was new? In a democracy with a variety of
| views, it is hard for there to be government-sanctioned truths.
|
| Without wanting to be too cynical, it's also worth pointing out
| that there's lots of precedent for the government stripping
| minorities of their rights in the name of national security. The
| only difference here is that the minority being targeted happens
| to be White.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| >I imagine we all agree that disinformation should be curbed
|
| I don't agree with that. I think the problem is precisely those
| who think they get to decide what is and isn't disinformation
| and who gets to choose to curb it.
| asterialite wrote:
| That's kind of what I'm saying, though. Disinformation is a
| problem, but because there is no objective arbiter of truth,
| curbing free speech to prevent it is impossible. Anyone who
| _can_ do so (i.e. Jack Dorsey, Amazon, etc.) has immense
| power, and this is a bad thing.
| MarkLowenstein wrote:
| You've successfully made the opposite side's point. You cite
| election-fraud misinformation as "leading to deaths", which is
| misinformation itself: the 5 deaths at the Capitol were 3
| rioters having a heart attack, stroke, and apparently trampled;
| 1 rioter shot by a security person; and 1 Capitol policeman who
| died the next day of causes unknown to his own family still,
| yet erroneously trumpeted by NYT etc. as being killed by a fire
| extinguisher.
|
| And, armed with this disinformation, you propose to abandon one
| of the core societal principles which has allowed America to
| succeed beyond anyone's imaginations. Now hopefully you can see
| why everyone's alarmed about what's going on.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >I imagine we all agree that disinformation should be curbed
|
| Who decides what is 'disinformation' or 'misinformation'? You?
| The Democratic representatives? Jack Dorsey? No thanks. I think
| I'd like to make up my own mind.
|
| Your politics also shine through your comment which also
| betrays your biases. Free speech is hard when it's speech you
| don't like and used by your political opponents .. isn't it.
| asterialite wrote:
| > Who decides what is 'disinformation' or 'misinformation'?
| You? The Democratic representatives? Jack Dorsey? No thanks.
|
| You are restating what I said almost word for word -- but
| still disagreeing. Somehow. Everyone probably agrees that
| disinformation must be curbed; not everyone agrees on what
| exactly disinformation is.
|
| You seem to think I'm biased against Republicans. This is the
| case. You seem to be biased against Democrats. That is the
| _point_. We have biases, and as such cannot agree on what the
| objective truth really is. That 's why determining whether
| something is true, misinformation, or disinformation is hard.
| bzbarsky wrote:
| Not everyone agrees that disinformation should be curbed.
| And the reason many people, including the authors of the US
| Constitution, don't agree, is that they feel the risk of
| false positives is far too high.
|
| That is _because_ I have no confidence that anyone doing
| the curbing, including myself, will correctly identify
| "misinformation", I don't want such curbing to be
| happening, period.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I imagine we all agree that disinformation should be curbed
|
| I think it, and the processes around it, needs to be
| _understood_.
|
| Whether it needs to be _curbed_ is another question; it
| certainly needs not to be systematically advantaged unless
| avoiding that would have greater adverse costs which means,
| when it is spreading within a regulated system like Cable TV,
| it definitely needs to be understood to assure that the spread
| is not an artifact of, or enhanced unintentionally by, the
| structure of regulation. Which makes it an important area of
| legislative inquiry _even given the assumption_ that none of
| the disinformation covered is outside of the scope of protected
| speech.
| njharman wrote:
| Judging what is and is not misinformation must always be in the
| hands of the people. Never the hands of authorities whether those
| be government or corporate.
|
| Why must fight all censorship. Because once you allow "a thing"
| to be censored, it becomes possible to censor "any thing".
|
| Things in the past which were labeled misinformation and would
| have been suppressed for even longer (or forever) under current
| social attitudes of censoring anything that might make us feel
| bad. - Leaded gasoline poisoning all of the
| country. - Tobacco is addicting and gives you cancer.
| - Agent Orange caused US military health problems. - PTSD
| is a mental health issue (denied since at least WWI).
|
| Remember all the power/leeway you give to the "left" (or right)
| will also be misused when the "right" (or left) take power again.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _Judging what is and is not misinformation must always be in
| the hands of the people. Never the hands of authorities whether
| those be government or corporate._
|
| The government is the people, no? In any case, by the time the
| country elects a majority federal politicians who are all
| unified in spreading the same misinformation, we were in
| trouble _long_ before that...
|
| Also, if you think these letters represent censorship, I think
| you should take a look at the definition of that word. At best,
| you're crying wolf and at worst, you're spreading
| misinformation yourself.
| trey-jones wrote:
| I agree with this:
|
| > Never the hands of authorities whether those be government or
| corporate.
|
| But I'm not sure about this:
|
| > Judging what is and is not misinformation must always be in
| the hands of the people.
|
| It's definitely a _very_ difficult problem. I like to think
| that I personally can distinguish decently well between
| information and mis /dis-information, but I look around and see
| plenty of people who simply cannot. And I could also be wrong
| about myself. The pandemic itself has at least had the effect
| of showing me that I can't always figure out what's true by
| intuition.
|
| So I guess I believe that people in general are not good at
| making the distinction. We're too emotional. I'm inclined to
| say that a digital solution has the best chance of defeating
| this digital problem. A computer for President, I guess.
| offby37years wrote:
| If you don't trust your fellow citizens to discern
| misinformation from truth, you don't trust them to vote.
| statstutor wrote:
| That doesn't follow.
|
| I would still rather have voting citizens trying to discern
| the truth (and hope for some wisdom of the crowds), rather
| than have the agents of misinformation permanently in
| charge.
| trey-jones wrote:
| I don't, do you? It's the slipperiest slope around,
| however. For instance:
|
| In my state there was an executive order from the governor
| allowing mask mandates, but polling places were
| specifically excluded, because you simply _cannot_ disallow
| people from voting.
|
| Another _very_ difficult problem. How can you enforce voter
| education without enabling voter suppression? I don 't have
| an answer. I'm mainly here to point out that problems are
| hard.
| Clubber wrote:
| People certainly aren't perfect about judging the validity of
| information, but the danger is just too great to have a
| corporation and especially a government decide what's valid
| information.
| trey-jones wrote:
| I am in complete agreement.
| protonfish wrote:
| "The People" believe whatever information has been promoted the
| most. To claim that we should do nothing to stop malevolent
| organizations from radicalizing vulnerable citizens is
| reckless. To lay the blame on individuals to fight this is
| victim-blaming. We need to battle this industrialized con
| artistry with whatever power we have - including police,
| courts, and laws.
|
| Throwing up our hands because "censorship bad!" is sick and
| wrong.
| linuxftw wrote:
| Who is 'we'? I don't wish to be included in 'we' and I prefer
| that the group of 'we' not be in charge of much of anything.
| whydoibother wrote:
| Does the concept of a collective confuse you?
| linuxftw wrote:
| As long as someone can adequately explain who the
| collective is, and what they perceive legitimizes their
| ability to make decisions for others.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Yes but we have made the judiciary the judge of what goes
| further than free speech, not the legislative.
|
| And that is key.
|
| PREEMPTIVE censorship is always a mistake because it only
| relies on power ideologies.
| protonfish wrote:
| Remember when we all agreed Nazis were bad? Good times.
| medicineman wrote:
| Despite your attempt to be funny, I don't think that time
| ever existed.
| pfortuny wrote:
| What does that even mean? Did I agree to that?
| protonfish wrote:
| You seem to want us to fight them with one arm behind our
| back. I, however, don't care whatever it is you think
| "we" decided. I believe we should fight fascist
| propaganda with all the the tools we can grab. Lord knows
| they are. Current authoritarian disinformation campaigns
| are a massive and immediate threat to all humanity. If
| you think so too, then stop bringing knives to this
| gunfight.
| _-david-_ wrote:
| The problem is determining who is a fascist. The term
| fascist (and also Nazi) is one of the most overused words
| resulting in many people being falsely labeled fascist.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _we should fight fascist propaganda with all the the
| tools we can grab._
|
| "What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to
| get after the Devil?"
| minikites wrote:
| Exactly, the current strain of Conservative "thought" is to
| attack all forms of authority in order to muddle the truth
| and introduce doubt that any subject is knowable or provable.
| Allowing misinformation to spread serves that goal nicely and
| all they have to do is sit back and do nothing.
|
| Their entire goal is to create a society where their gut
| opinions are just as good as knowledge from experts, because
| experts hurt their feelings (e.g. the Conservative reaction
| to the 1619 Project:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1776_Commission).
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Exactly, the current strain of Conservative "thought" is
| to attack all forms of authority in order to muddle the
| truth and introduce doubt that any subject is knowable or
| provable.
|
| Which is kind of a weird whiplash, because it was not all
| that long ago that that was the standard attack of the
| Right against the "postmodern" Left.
| skynet-9000 wrote:
| This is a strikingly _illiberal_ stance. Attacking free
| speech is precisely the opposite of what civil liberties
| has traditionally all been about.
| minikites wrote:
| Why is it worth protecting speech that is knowingly false
| and inflammatory? Think about the paradox of tolerance.
| True free speech is under threat by the torrent of
| misinformation and from the constant assault on the very
| idea of expertise. We as a society have to be active
| agents to counter misinformation, we can't just sit by
| and hope it works itself out in "the marketplace of
| ideas" because that's not how misinformation functions.
| This is not a new problem, but the internet gives it a
| new scale which we have yet to reckon with.
| kryogen1c wrote:
| > Things in the past which were labeled misinformation
|
| I know that item-level thinking like this is necessary to gain
| emotional traction with people, but this issue is just so
| obvious at a systems-level.
|
| the idea that we, right now the instant youre reading this,
| have discovered 100% of what there is to learn and 0% of what
| we know is wrong is so painfully, horrifically, obviously
| stupid (we've had computers for thirty years now, we're
| probably good for ETERNITY, right?). we both WANT and NEED a
| mechanism for dissenters and disinformation. misinformation is
| combat with MORE discussion, not less!
|
| scientific consensus is not arrived at when every scientific
| paper says the same thing. this is a fundamentally wrong view
| of science and also reality. on any given topic, the corpus
| includes opposing conclusions. eventually we figure out why and
| discern the underlying principles.
|
| to say anything but this is to make the existential case that
| people are not to be trusted with their own free will.
| ardy42 wrote:
| > misinformation is combat with MORE discussion, not less!
|
| The problem with that idea is that it takes more effort to
| debunk a lie than to tell one. It also takes more effort to
| _absorb_ a debunking than a lie. That 's why disinformation
| works.
|
| Here's an example: JFK ate babies occasionally, and the media
| hushed it up. Oswald was actually a secret high-level CIA
| operative, and was so outraged by this that he assassinated
| JFK for it.
|
| It took me two seconds to write that. How much effort would
| it take you to debunk it?
|
| It's just not practical to put all the burden of combating
| misinformation on each individual's shoulders. It's also
| necessary to stop the spread of misinformation. That doesn't
| need to be done by a central authority, but people who've
| been convinced by a lie will perceive that as "censorship" by
| one.
|
| > scientific consensus is not arrived at when every
| scientific paper says the same thing. this is a fundamentally
| wrong view of science and also reality. on any given topic,
| the corpus includes opposing conclusions. eventually we
| figure out why and discern the underlying principles.
|
| Scientific consensus is also not arrived at by publishing
| literally every crackpot idea, and answering each with "more
| discussion." Science has several mechanisms for "censoring"
| bullshit and misinformation (e.g. peer review), and it
| couldn't function without it. "More discussion" is saved for
| cases where those mechanisms failed.
| cassalian wrote:
| So you'd like to make lying illegal...? I have an amendment
| to show you, it's actually the very first one!
| temp8964 wrote:
| Your example actually tells something. Nobody would believe
| your JFK baby eating story. It is easy to write a fake
| story, but it is not easy to have lots of people believe
| your fake story. "Misinformation" can spread because they
| seem plausible to enough people, not because they are
| "bullshit" like your example.
| drwiggly wrote:
| The problem with your calling this example out, is that
| people will believe this stuff if down the rabbit hole
| enough.
|
| Jan 20th Biden and Harris were supposed to be arrested
| and their pedo evidence was suppose to be shown to all,
| along with evidence of election fraud.
|
| The next one is what March 7th?
|
| A lot of people think an ancient all powerful being will
| re-appear and lift up adherents on high, and punish "bad"
| non believers.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > It is easy to write a fake story, but it is not easy to
| have lots of people believe your fake story.
|
| I thought so too before Pizzagate, Q-Anon....
| jesseryoung wrote:
| Perhaps a better example: Jewish people are telling you
| the earth is round so that way they can distract you from
| the fact they're kidnapping children and drinking their
| blood.
|
| A fantastic video on the topic of difficult to debunk,
| but easy to produce content
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44.
| josephorjoe wrote:
| I wish you were right, but you are not. It is very easy
| to have lots of people believe a fake story.
|
| QAnon conspiracy theories are incoherent and absurd yet
| are embraced by thousands and cause needless harm to
| many.
| parineum wrote:
| > "Misinformation" can spread because they seem plausible
| to enough people
|
| Conspiracy theories are only believed by those who
| already mistrust the target. If there's a lot of
| conspiracies revolving around something/someone, you have
| a trust problem.
| mcguire wrote:
| How about Jewish space lasers?
| CivBase wrote:
| > It took me two seconds to write that. How much effort
| would it take you to debunk it?
|
| How long would it take you to establish enough credibility
| to be able to make an accusation like that and have people
| actually take your word for it? There might be a few
| nutters out there who are so predisposed to hate JFK that
| they'll believe anything negative about him, but most
| people - even those who dislike him - would rightfully
| question such an outlandish statement made by someone with
| no credentials.
|
| Dishonest people retain credibility when their supporters
| are trapped in echo chambers designed to keep the truth
| out. Censorship is a powerful tool for establishing and
| maintaining echo chambers. We need to fight echo chambers,
| not promote censorship.
| ardy42 wrote:
| > How long would it take you to establish enough
| credibility to be able to make an accusation like that
| and have people actually take your word for it?
|
| Keep this in mind: Q is literally some dude on
| 4chan/8chan with a tripcode.
|
| > There might be a few nutters out there who are so
| predisposed to hate JFK that they'll believe anything
| negative about him, but most people - even those who
| dislike him - would rightfully question such an
| outlandish statement made by someone with no credentials.
|
| I make no claim that my example lie is a good example of
| misinformation/disinformation. It was only meant to show
| the asymmetry of effort implicit in "more discussion."
|
| The key thing about getting a lie to stick is to hitting
| the right emotional buttons with it. And it's _so easy_
| broadcast lies nowadays that you can even discover those
| buttons stochastically, by just throwing random lies out
| there and seeing what sticks.
|
| Furthermore, if your goal is not to convince anyone of
| anything in particular, but to just to gum up a society
| (which is the goal of disinformation, properly
| understood), you don't event need to find particular lies
| with a broad appeal across society. You just need enough
| lies that enough people fall for one or two.
| CivBase wrote:
| I believe it is reasonable to speculate that QAnon
| members are generally trapped in extreme, right-wing echo
| chambers. Echo chambers enable people to retain
| undeserved credibility.
| ardy42 wrote:
| > I believe it is reasonable to speculate that QAnon
| members are generally trapped in extreme, right-wing echo
| chambers. Echo chambers enable people to retain
| undeserved credibility.
|
| That's not true, for instance:
|
| https://www.startribune.com/conspiracy-theories-of-qanon-
| fin...
|
| > Conspiracy theories of QAnon find fertile ground in an
| unexpected place - the yoga world
|
| > QAnon's conspiracy theories have taken root among yogis
| and other adherents of natural medicine.
| CivBase wrote:
| I'm not sure how that demonstrates QAnon members are not
| generally trapped in right-wing echo chambers. Are yoga
| practitioners exempt from right-wing echo chambers?
| ardy42 wrote:
| > I'm not sure how that demonstrates QAnon members are
| not generally trapped in right-wing echo chambers. Are
| yoga practitioners exempt from right-wing echo chambers?
|
| I suppose a significant number of yoga
| teachers/influencers could be secret dittoheads, but the
| idea kind of beggars belief.
|
| One of the interesting things about QAnon is that it
| offered on-ramps to groups outside the stereotype of
| people would go for such a theory (e.g. "save the
| children"). People in right-wing echo chambers were
| definitely more susceptible, but it's a mistake to be
| reassured by that.
|
| Also, _particular_ echo chambers aren 't some kind of
| primordial entity. They start all the time and they often
| grow. So even if something like QAnon requires one, that
| just means there's one more step.
| CivBase wrote:
| Are yoga practitioners usually liberal? Is that a thing?
| My perception has always been that yoga communities tend
| to attract those interested in "alternative medicine", a
| group which certainly has its own share of echo chambers.
| Given the apparent ideologically-insular nature of both
| groups, I'm not surprised that there would be overlap
| between the them.
|
| Echo chambers are not a new phenomena, but they have
| certainly become more powerful with the rise of the
| internet. Never before have we been so easily able to
| surround ourselves with groups of like-minded
| individuals. But what I find even more concerning are
| algorithmically-driven content feeds which are tailored
| to suite the preferences of each individual user.
|
| Algorithmically-driven, tailored content feeds basically
| automate the creation of echo chambers. It all sounds
| well and good to the user - after all, they get access to
| more of the type of content they prefer. However, those
| feeds almost inevitably learn to always provide the user
| exclusively with content that reinforces their
| preexisting ideas and opinions. They'll eagerly spread
| things like QAnon if it results in increased user
| engagement.
|
| I don't think there's anything particularly special about
| QAnon compared to any other politically-charged
| conspiracy group. I think they just got lucky and once
| they passed a certain threshold of popularity, the
| algorithms did what they do best.
| rayiner wrote:
| > Scientific consensus also not arrived at by publishing
| literally every crackpot idea, and answering each with
| "more discussion." Science has several mechanisms for
| "censoring" bullshit and misinformation (e.g. peer review),
| and it couldn't function without it.
|
| What counts as a "crackpot idea?" We don't have to dabble
| in hypotheticals about JFK eating babies. We have real
| examples from current political events that show we're not
| talking about "slippery slopes" here. We have rolled down
| the slope with stunning speed.
|
| In March 2020, the Surgeon General suggested that wearing
| masks was effective to prevent spread of COVID was a
| crackpot idea:
| https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/485332-surgeon-
| general... ("Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are
| NOT effective in preventing general public from catching
| #Coronavirus[.]").
|
| 10 months later, the Surgeon General is calling that same
| assertion a "myth": https://twitter.com/surgeon_general/sta
| tus/13189727242078986... ("There is a currently circulating
| MYTH suggesting masks don't work to prevent spread of
| COVID-19.").
|
| I have a degree in aerospace engineering--I totally get
| that scientific understanding evolves. But it doesn't
| evolve like that. The truth is that the Surgeon General's
| March 2020 statement was ill-advised and overly-certain,
| and so was the October 2020 statement. Whether masks are
| effective at limiting the spread of COVID is quite
| uncertain. Mask-wearing rates vary quite dramatically
| between countries with similar COVID death rates:
| https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/08/face-
| off.... By June 2020, the U.S. had mask-wearing rates of
| 75%. Denmark, Sweden, and Norway were under 20%. Out of
| those, Sweden and the U.S. have death rates (per
| population) 5-10 times higher than Denmark and Norway.
|
| Despite that uncertainty, I think most people worried about
| "misinformation" would use mask-denialism as a motivating
| example for why restrictions are needed. So what are the
| restrictionists really advocating for here?
| pen2l wrote:
| > The issue is actually pretty uncertain, and government
| bodies are making categorical statements for political
| reasons
|
| I think it's more complicated than just politics, as I
| was saying elsewhere
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26139732), public
| health officials advised against mask-wearing for general
| public initially for a very particular reason (possible
| shortages for medical frontline workers). As far as
| public healthy policy is concerned, where you cannot pass
| a certain threshold of complexity in communicating best
| practices to grandmas around the nation, masks work is a
| good enough message and it stands on pretty solid
| science: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.
| 31.20166116v...
| NortySpock wrote:
| And it was damned foolish to say "masks don't work" if
| what they wanted the public to understand was "please
| leave surgical and N95 masks for healthcare workers. We
| are exploring the effectiveness of cloth masks".
|
| THAT would have been honesty, it would have explained the
| reason they didn't want the general public using masks,
| and it would have hinted at an alternative while not
| directly confirming masks work (or don't work).
|
| NOT TO MENTION that the CDC probably could have asked
| South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, or any other country where
| mask usage was common, "How well do masks work?" and been
| pointed at a few relevant studies, right? But no, they
| make a very fishy statement to the public claiming masks
| don't work for normal people.
|
| /rant Sorry. You hit a nerve. Pretty frustrated that the
| CDC would throw away its credibility like that.
| shakezula wrote:
| > misinformation is combat with MORE discussion, not less!
|
| I wholeheartedly agree, but how do you get the other side to
| listen?
|
| The saying goes something like "You can't reason someone out
| of a position they didn't reason themselves into."
| leesalminen wrote:
| It basically doesn't matter if you get the other side to
| listen or not. Open and free discussion is out there for
| those who want to partake. There will always be zealots who
| choose not to.
|
| Censoring opposition in order to be heard more loudly
| doesn't work. In an IRL discussion, if you start talking
| over someone forcing them to stop talking, they're going to
| shut down and never listen to anything you have to say.
| shakezula wrote:
| It matters very much when that other side has the control
| of your government.
| leesalminen wrote:
| Luckily that changes every 4 or 8 years.
| ajwin wrote:
| > I wholeheartedly agree, but how do you get the other side
| to listen?
|
| The only way is to stop preaching and listen to them.
| Really listen. This is how Daryl Davis converted the KKK
| according to his own accounts?
| colpabar wrote:
| > _How do you get the other side to listen?_
|
| Pretend you think like them, and make arguments that go
| against that thinking. Unfortunately, the way the media
| exists today this _never_ happens, and both sides just
| attack strawmen in ways that get people to click their
| headlines and listen to their talking heads.
|
| I think it's disingenuous to paint the entire "other side"
| as unreasonable, but I may be misinterpreting what you mean
| by "other side" here. There will always be unreasonable
| people, and I don't have a solution for them. However, I
| think _a lot_ of people are very tired of being demonized
| for disagreeing. Not every republican is a rabid tea
| partier, and not every democrat supports antifa.
| kaibee wrote:
| > I think it's disingenuous to paint the entire "other
| side" as unreasonable, but I may be misinterpreting what
| you mean by "other side" here. There will always be
| unreasonable people, and I don't have a solution for
| them. However, I think _a lot_ of people are very tired
| of being demonized for disagreeing. Not every republican
| is a rabid tea partier, and not every democrat supports
| antifa.
|
| There's a lot of fundamental issues that are just not
| limited to "rabid tea partiers", global warming and the
| pandemic/masks just to pick two.
| kbenson wrote:
| > Pretend you think like them, and make arguments that go
| against that thinking.
|
| Both sides have attacked the trustworthiness of the
| other. You can't convince someone of something when they
| think you're lying, or will lie and dissemble to get what
| you want, and nothing you say can be taken at face value
| because it's all a con to get some other goal which you
| claim to not want.
|
| There has been such a concerted effort to so malign the
| other side that's it's less about clear communication
| than it is trust. It's got more in common with soldiers
| inpast wars being encouraged to use terms like krauts,
| gooks and chinks and those being used as stereotypes to
| explain the behavior and motivations of the other side
| than anything else, IMO.
| rayiner wrote:
| The purpose isn't to get "the other side to listen." Its to
| get moderate to listen, and to make sure the other side
| feels heard. That procedural aspect of free speech is at
| least as important, if not more so, than the truth-finding
| aspect of free speech.
| markkanof wrote:
| There is also a problem with approaching this type of
| dialog as one side vs. the other. People are all over the
| spectrum with their opinions on various issues. You might
| have a disagreement on one particular issue, but it's
| likely that you also have some common ground on other
| things. Use that to relate to people and try to influence
| their thinking to your point of view. It's not a war where
| you are trying to destroy "the other side".
| [deleted]
| lurquer wrote:
| > I wholeheartedly agree, but how do you get the other side
| to listen?
|
| Re-education camps seem to be the go-to solution for many
| totalitarian regimes.
|
| I'm not being a smart-ass... the desire some have for
| others to agree with them can itself be a pernicious thing.
| shakezula wrote:
| Maybe "agreement" isn't what I meant as the goal - only
| progress. Fair point to address that they're not equal.
| [deleted]
| ihsw wrote:
| Reconciliation among people is usually governed by the
| reframing of sacred issues, eg:
|
| > Scientific advancement is an effort to grow closer to God
| as God created an infinitely complex universe, it is not an
| effort to grow further away from God. Additionally, hard
| work is a sign of having the grace of God, and as such
| vaccinations are provided by the grace of God and it is our
| duty to receive them.
|
| It doesn't take much to meet people halfway and communicate
| in a language that they understand, and naturally that will
| involve cooperation, dialogue, and compromise.
|
| "Get the other side to listen" is the wrong point of view
| to have, it should be "which of my ideas are appealing and
| which are not."
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Assume good intentions, respect them as individuals, and
| listen to what they have to say even if you disagree.
|
| These are basic tenants of productive debate.
| shakezula wrote:
| I completely agree with these points - but that's not
| what I'm saying. I'm saying what do you do when your
| partner in debate completely ignores all of those things,
| but has equal say in the outcomes?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Agree to disagree, vote on it, and sometimes loose. Part
| of being in a democracy is that sometimes you dont get
| what you want, even when you are sure you are right.
|
| Change can be slow, even for good ideas. If you have
| faith in humanity and democracy, then you believe good
| ideas will prevail in the end. There were US
| abolitionists in 1770 and the civil rights movement ended
| in 1970.
| shakezula wrote:
| And when the problems require solutions in decades and
| not centuries to be agreed on? What then?
|
| I used to have a lot more faith in our democracy but I
| can't help but feel lately like something has
| fundamentally changed, and the system is just catching up
| to that. What changed? I have no idea, but something
| feels _different_ from before.
| [deleted]
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Sometimes. I know people who only care to maximize for
| themselves and their immediate tribe, and could not care
| less what happens to others not useful for them.
|
| It is naive to play the game as if others aren't
| interested in capturing an outsized share of the
| winnings. And obviously they're not going to officially
| state their motives.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I'm not convinced any other strategy of discourse is a
| winning one. Competing disinformation campaigns are a
| race to the bottom where everyone looses. Also, sometimes
| people simply want different things.
| nitsky wrote:
| I have heard this expression rephrased as "Logic is useless
| against those who reject it".
|
| However, in my experience, both sides are logical, they
| just start from different axioms.
| shakezula wrote:
| This is my experience as well, but I've also noticed that
| both sides do not adhere to their base axioms with the
| same tenacity, and the issues can be a spectrum of
| adherence to their claimed base beliefs.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| For me, a good start would be to provide evidence that
| people have had their minds changed because information
| gets discussed more. E.g. you could demonstrate that the
| qanon phenomenon became less popular, not more, after it
| began getting wide media attention. (Unfortunately in this
| instance the opposite is the case. You have an uphill
| battle ahead trying to demonstrate your position
| empirically.)
| shakezula wrote:
| Q is a really interesting conspiracy theory to bring up.
| It seems to be at the other end of the "valley" of
| conspiracy theories - it's almost like the most brazenly
| unbelievable ones are the ones that somehow gain the most
| traction.
| leesalminen wrote:
| It combined several long running conspiracy theories into
| one. Because they had been around for so long
| individually, combining them somehow made them more
| believable. Connecting seemingly disparate dots together
| added credibility because it explained everything
| conspiracy theorists believed.
| PTOB wrote:
| "Leaded gasoline poisoning all of the [world]." FTFY
| devwastaken wrote:
| We either allow foreign influence to undo our democracy or we
| allow current and future governments to suppress our democracy.
|
| We should isolate western internet lines from
| russia/china/israel and any cooperating countries that are
| apart of these significant bot campaigns that generate fake
| news targeting our elections.
|
| We're still at war, and information is the weapons of that war.
| We are currently allowing fascist governments to take advantage
| of the inherent flaws to democracy - belief and choice.
| adamcstephens wrote:
| Eliminate the foreign influence, and you will still have a
| corrupt system filled with fascist information. At the same
| time you will have undermined American companies since every
| other country will wonder when they're next.
|
| I know it's easy to blame the other, but democracy rots from
| within.
| beowulfey wrote:
| Can you explain this a bit more? At least for the first two,
| that information was disseminated by government bans or
| government-mandated labeling. I am not as familiar with Agent
| Orange but it was first studied by the New Jersey Agent Orange
| Commission in 1980 and found to be toxic -- it helped lead to
| the Agent Orange Act. PTSD was first recognized by the APA in
| 1980 as well. These are all positions of authority making these
| decisions and claims.
|
| I guess I am just confused what your point is here. Can you
| explain how the voices of the people were involved in the above
| examples?
| tetrahedr0n wrote:
| I believe the OP's point was that those things (Agent orange,
| tobacco <> cancer, etc) which our society almost universally
| agree upon were once, themselves, targeted by
| dis/misinformation campaigns.
|
| And that if we are to allow censorship, we are allowing the
| potential for disinformation campaigns.
|
| IMO, the flaws in this argument are that it assumes a
| disinformation campaign is something the censor entity is
| controlling (specifically the US military, in the Agent
| Orange example). It also assumes disinformation is the only
| tactic available to a bad actor to manipulate the public.
|
| To the spirit of the OP's point, though, I think we need to
| be wary of any corporation pledging to make the world a safer
| place by monitoring our communications.
|
| Of course the situation is not binary; there are things that
| should be censored. I would like our law enforcement to use
| any tool at their disposal to stop human trafficking. Murder
| is not cool, AT&T should help LE look into those as well.
| Politician Y is trolling the internet with lies; we actually
| have a toolset for that and it's called journalism.
| Understanding that journalism/media is actually part of the
| problem here doesn't mean AT&T can do a better job.
| specialist wrote:
| Garbage in, garbage out.
|
| Solution is real simple: share your data, cite your sources,
| sign your name.
|
| Without provenance, accountability, transparency, it doesn't
| matter who is judging.
| shakezula wrote:
| The problem is there's a non-trivial amount of people who
| consider their ignorance equal to your research, your facts,
| your studies, your anything.
| munk-a wrote:
| That isn't a problem unless you're discussing something
| where anonymity is key - or it wouldn't be if the internet
| didn't make anonymity the rule by default. Anonymity is
| really great for private citizens, but people trying to
| spread information need to be held to a higher standard
| since their words shouldn't be preemptively censored but
| must be held to account after the fact.
|
| Oh also, taking away anonymity is quite dangerous as well -
| there isn't an easy answer here.
| shakezula wrote:
| I'm not sure I'm convinced that taking away anonymity
| fixes the problem. We have very prominent politicians who
| are driving entire political campaigns around this
| strategy of ignoring all fact.
| apostacy wrote:
| Lets of course also not forget the biggest one, COVID.
|
| COVID was fake news, until it wasn't. Previous weeks (months?)
| were spent suppressing warnings about it.
|
| I specifically remember being banned for saying that people
| should wear face coverings. In February I tried saying that
| people should think twice before taking the subway or going to
| Lunar New Year.
|
| January 2020, there was overwhelming evidence that _something_
| bad was coming, even though independent and citizen journalists
| didn 't know the exact scope of it.
|
| But their narrative was that COVID may exist but it isn't
| dangerous, and wearing a mask is alarmist and probably
| sinophobic racist Russian propaganda; continue having public
| gatherings and stop asking questions.
|
| Within 48 hours, big tech decided that the truth is that we had
| always been at war with Eurasia and that anyone who had any
| doubts about lockdown strategy was basically a white
| supremacist and needed to be censored with extreme prejudice.
|
| In my mind, that should have been it. After so many lives lost,
| that is when we should have decided that corporate america
| should not set up a de-facto ministry of truth, but I guess
| most people don't agree with me.
| Terretta wrote:
| To be fair, that wasn't "corporate America", that was the
| Minister of Unhealth, usually called the Surgeon General:
|
| _" Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT
| effective in preventing general public from catching
| #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can't get them to
| care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at
| risk!"_
|
| https://www.snopes.com/tachyon/2020/05/Screen-
| Shot-2020-05-1...
|
| The tweet made no sense: if you're a member of the public,
| COVID cleverly renders masks ineffective, so leave them for
| healthcare providers where COVID magically can't bypass the
| masks?
|
| The only things more annoying than pretending COVID could
| discriminate by profession were (a) the additional six to
| nine months of pretending it wasn't airborne, and (b) company
| annoyance with remote work and individual boredom with
| staying home overriding caution even as the spread hits rates
| not seen since March/April 2020.
|
| And this is where Corporate America comes in -- they are by
| and large refusing to acknowledge the revision in guidance
| around it being airborne, since this would require more
| investment to make safe the butts-in-seats management
| preferred by non-practitioners in middle and senior levels of
| firms.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| It's so far been in the hands of the courts, and like you said,
| they don't determine what's free speech based on whether
| something makes us feel bad.
|
| Per bhupy, their specific criteria is whether the speech is
| "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and
| is likely to incite or produce such action".
|
| If the misinformation on certain media outlets is considered by
| the courts to have incited the insurrection , then it may not
| be considered free speech.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > If the misinformation on certain media outlets is
| considered by the courts to have incited the insurrection
|
| The courts will not consider it to be incitement. If you
| think the courts even might, you are woefully deficient in
| your understanding of case law. A key word in the Brandenburg
| standard is "imminent", and that makes the Brandenburg bar
| _very_ high. Taking a crowd of antisemites to a Jewish
| neighborhood and telling them antisemitic creeds and how all
| Jews need to die doesn 't meet that bar--but pointing to a
| Jew and saying "there's a Jew, get him" does.
|
| Thinking SCOTUS might take a narrower view of free speech
| than its established precedent holds is not a winning bet.
| I'm not aware of a single case in my lifetime where SCOTUS
| ruled for more government restriction of speech rather than
| less, and this approach means taking a broader view of free
| speech than perhaps most people are willing to stomach (e.g.,
| Citizens United).
| rayiner wrote:
| > If the misinformation on certain media outlets is
| considered by the courts to have incited the insurrection ,
| then it may not be considered free speech.
|
| The legal standard for "inciting or producing imminent
| lawless action" is given by _Brandenburg v. Ohio_. In that
| case, which upheld speech openly advocating for violence
| against specific groups to be protected speech. It overturned
| an Ohio law that had been directed against communists who
| "advocated the duty, necessity, or propriety of crime,
| sabotage, violence, or unlawful methods of terrorism as a
| means of accomplishing industrial or political reform."
| _Brandenburg_ was a 9-0 Warren court decision.
|
| Courts will not uphold anything that has been said about the
| election as outside the boundaries of free speech, under
| _Brandenburg._
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| It is, but I'm not certain the courts will interpret it the
| same way when applied to a large media corporation making
| many statements over a long period of time.
|
| Like rayiner said, the courts have been protective of media
| corporation's free speech, but those were cases involving
| defamation or intentional infliction of emotional distress,
| not an insurrection with the intent to detain and possibly
| murder elected officials.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hustler_Magazine_v._Falwell h
| ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan
| tiahura wrote:
| Both of those cases were unanimous decisions upholding
| free speech. Moreover, they were civil, not criminal
| cases.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| They were, and they addressed parody and defamation,
| which I'm guessing wouldn't apply to a case, civil or
| criminal, about whether media corporations incited an
| insurrection.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Related:
|
| https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-escalates-
| pressure...
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| Hard disagree. We can censor, for example, child pornography,
| bomb-building tutorials, and revenge porn. I'm not going to
| fight against censoring them on the grounds that allowing them
| to be censored will allow anything else to be censored too.
| LanceH wrote:
| For all of those, they passed a law which has to stand up to
| judicial scrutiny.
|
| Leaning on a company to eliminate speech is censorship
| without review.
|
| edit: removed extra word
| mjevans wrote:
| Incorrect. We can __prosecute__ against those who break the
| law. We __must not__ censor, because that is the slippery
| slope; all the more so when it is done without judicial
| oversight in an adversarial review system.
| leesalminen wrote:
| Agreed. If something is explicitly illegal, then that's
| grounds for censorship. If something isn't explicitly
| illegal, then it shouldn't be censored. The First Amendment
| in the US provides for nearly limitless free speech, with
| very few exceptions. That's how we should police speech
| online.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| That is a distinction without a difference. You are talking
| about the mechanics of censorship.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| It isn't. There are two differences.
|
| The first is that prosecutions are retrospective. If
| something is true and you can't stop anyone from saying
| it, only punish them after, then people who are willing
| to sacrifice their freedom for the truth can't be
| silenced. There is also less incentive to punish them
| because the cat is already out of the bag, and people are
| more willing to push back against a prosecution for
| speaking a truth that they've seen survive an adversarial
| public debate.
|
| The second is that prosecutions happen in courts bound
| (in the US) by the First Amendment, and the prosecution
| fails if the defendant was engaged in protected speech.
| Facebook or Comcast/MSNBC (note: the same company)
| deciding what constitutes "misinformation" with no
| accountability for over-censoring is not that.
| jefft255 wrote:
| If I understand correctly, you're claiming that we __must
| not__ censor child pornography? Isn't prosecution a form of
| censorship anyways? I think what you're saying is a
| textbook example of a slippery slope fallacy.
| leesalminen wrote:
| Following the law is a slippery slope? I'm pretty sure
| the parent is saying that because child pornography is
| explicitly illegal, it can (and should) be censored.
| jjeaff wrote:
| I believe this is the same logic being used to sensor
| covid deniers, false cures, and fraudulent election
| crackpots like our last president.
|
| The latter type of lie incites people to insurrection and
| riles up violence, the other two cause people to do
| things that may kill themselves or others.
| leesalminen wrote:
| Last time I checked no court of law had convicted the
| former President of any criminal offense. So, no, I don't
| see how that logic was used to censor him.
|
| Same for false cures to diseases, nobody imprisons
| pseudoscience witch doctors for recommending vitamins to
| cure cancer. (Maybe if they claimed to be a medical
| doctor?) If that were so, I know of a half dozen people
| in Boulder that would've been in jail by now.
|
| So, as far as I can tell, these people had been censored
| without having committed a crime.
| Vaslo wrote:
| Except the items you cite are done on a fringe. Almost half
| of America is conservative, hardly some fringe.
| sneak wrote:
| See, even these descriptions which you presumably think are
| clear distinctions are not objective categories of
| information.
|
| Do drawings count? How about deepfakes? Pyrotechnic display
| textbooks?
|
| You're going to need a judge, and that judge is going to
| wield power.
| [deleted]
| goatcode wrote:
| >Judging what is and is not misinformation must always be in
| the hands of the people
|
| You disagree with letting censorship be decided on
| democratically?
| vkou wrote:
| The thing about democracy is that there are so many levels
| of government - and quite literally any decision made by a
| democratically elected government can be condemned as
| undemocratic (Because some other layer of government - or
| better yet, _a_ Joe on the street - does not agree with
| it.)
|
| This is how you get people shouting about how a
| democratically elected president, who was given, by a
| democratically elected congress, powers to operate a
| regulatory department, is acting undemocratic-ally [1],
| when he appoints someone those people don't like to head
| that department.
|
| What those people forget is that in a democracy, you can't
| in good faith cherrypick _outcomes_ as 'undemocratic'. You
| can only ensure that the _process_ for making changes is
| democratic. If the people you elect decided to turn your
| country into a police state, well, that sucks, but that 's
| a democratic decision that they've made - and as long as
| you can vote them out, it can be democratically reversed.
| Prohibition was reversed, after all, communist witch hunts
| eventually ended, it's no longer illegal to ride in a train
| car while black, people in the US are no longer jailed for
| writing pro-German newspaper articles, and we no longer
| round up entire ethnic groups, and concentrate them in a
| camp (Which are all hallmarks of a police state. They are
| no longer present in our society, thanks in part to a
| democratic process. Other hallmarks still are, but if
| enough people care, we'll eventually get around to them.)
|
| [1] Despite neither the constitution, the law that brought
| that department into existence, the judiciary, nor years of
| precedent requiring that the department must be ran by an
| elected official, or that the department's every decision
| [2] must be voted on by Congress.
|
| [2] As it turns out, it's quite democratic for an elected
| official to defer decision-making to an un-elected
| underling. That's fine. What makes this democratic, is that
| you can punish the elected official, if the underling
| behaves poorly, by voting them out. As long as all power
| flows from an elected office, this thing works. What is not
| fine is if the un-elected underling is not appointed, or
| fire-able by an elected office, or by an agent of an
| elected office. That's where the difference between
| democratic, and undemocratic lies.
| goatcode wrote:
| > democracy
|
| > democratically elected president
|
| That's not really what I was talking about.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > child pornography, bomb-building tutorials, and revenge
| porn
|
| None of these things are misinformation.
| swirepe wrote:
| Technically true, but try building a bomb from one of those
| tutorials
| dddddhf wrote:
| I have as a teenager made acetone peroxide and ammonium
| nitrate pipe bombs from instructions printed at the
| library. They worked ;)
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I wish the democrats would focus on good governance.
| simonh wrote:
| I'm deeply concerned about disinformation, it's a major problem.
| Politics has always had spin, and many issues are complex and it
| can be easy to state things too emphatically to press your case.
| Accusations of lying are everyday in politics. But recently flat
| out knowingly lying with the specific intent of deceiving people
| has become normalised. It's a serious threat.
|
| This is precisely the wrong way to tackle it though. We cannot
| ever allow government to control what can or cannot be said,
| outside narrow limits such as incitement to violence. Making the
| case for the truth will just have to be done the hard way.
|
| Fortunately it looks like this is only 2 congresscritters, not
| "House Democrats" generally. There are at least a handful of
| utter wing nuts on both party benches so last put this in
| perspective.
|
| The main problem with social media services is algorithms that
| drive engagement by turning people's feeds into an ever more
| extreme echo chamber. Whether it's lefties being zombified into
| SJW snowflakes deplatforming people on campuses, or Qannnon
| turning people into alt right political flat earthers. That's
| what they need to address, picking and choosing opinions to block
| is a fig leaf move that's more likely to backfire than improve
| anything. It's a hard problem though. What do we do about these
| engagement algorithms? I've no clue.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > This is precisely the wrong way to tackle it though. We
| cannot ever allow government to control what can or cannot be
| said
|
| Can you please point me to a proposal for government to control
| what can or cannot be said?
|
| Not a speculation about what _might_ , in the future, be
| proposed based on what some people fear based on the questions
| in these letters, but an actual concrete proposal?
|
| Otherwise, I don't see how "This is precisely the wrong way to
| tackle it" follows from "We cannot ever allow..." since the
| only possible thing "this" can refer to doesn't, at all,
| involve the thing we "cannot ever allow".
| dnissley wrote:
| Are you not able to see the implicit threat in this letter?
| Spivak wrote:
| > outside narrow limits such as incitement to violence
|
| Why can't those narrow limits include "flat out knowingly lying
| with the specific intent of deceiving people?" Sure it's a very
| human definition but it's one with built-in limits on its
| scope. You can't use it to ban wrongthink because it has to be
| from people who know that they're lying.
|
| > turning people's feeds into an ever more extreme echo chamber
|
| So yes but also this is done voluntarily. Those algorithms are
| keying on to the fact that I do not want specific kinds of
| content. If given the option I'll even explicitly make my
| preferences known -- I've blocked probably a thousand
| subreddits just to make my /r/all tolerable; Twitter is only
| usable if you confine yourself to niches. It's #general or
| barrens chat that's the cesspool of nonstop screaming.
| noxer wrote:
| Even if there would be a simple way to define "lying" in this
| context and a simple 100% effective way to proof it. It would
| only shift the problem not solve it. You can already "lie"
| under oath if you formulate something as opinion if there is
| nothing that contradicts your statement, its that simple. If
| people can be sentenced for the writing words online if they
| intentionally lied that just puts a target on normal people
| an make professional writers team up with lawyers to avoid
| ever writing anything that could be deemed a lie. That solve
| no problem at all. People find a way to tell you that the
| earth is flat anyway. Putting wrong speaking closer to
| wrongdoings is a very dangerous idea in general. we should
| want more speak not less and we get that if speech is
| tolerated.
|
| The "inciting violence" thing is already very very close to
| breaking the concept of free speech. And it can also be
| defeated simply by linguistic tricks. "Kill the ...." would
| incite violence but "I think we should kill the ..."
| expresses an opinion. Also this very example here used the
| same words as something that in fact could incites violence
| but clearly my post isn't. Now do we really want an AI to
| detect de difference? Or maybe real human? Moderators who are
| almost certainly not qualified to judge because a content
| moderator isn't a judge and should not be.
| avesi wrote:
| Who determines what is true and what's a lie? Why do you
| trust them to make the right call?
| dnissley wrote:
| Precisely -- and let's be clear here: the disinformation
| being discussed here breaks down along partisan lines.
|
| We can barely get republicans and democrats to agree on a
| budget, what makes anyone think that they could reasonably
| come to an agreement on objective standards of truth in
| media? Let alone a process by which those standards are
| enforced? This is way, wayyyyy outside the realm of
| reality.
| noxer wrote:
| Yes, the "fact-checkers" we already have should give us a
| hint at what "lie-checkers" would do.
| Spivak wrote:
| Then don't have them. Having lie checkers on the internet
| is a moronic idea. This rule is to stop organized
| coordinated disinformation campaigns. It's to take down
| sites who's whole purpose is to literally make up news
| stories, present them as fact, and spread them on social
| media.
| Spivak wrote:
| Wait no. That's not how this works. There's no
| determination of fact. It doesn't matter whether what you
| said is true or false -- this isn't a rule against being
| wrong. It's a rule against someone speaking something they
| know and believe a priori to be false with the intent to
| mislead people.
|
| Like it's literally the same ideas as fraud but applied to
| misinformation. If you believe that climate change is a
| hoax then you're fine, tell the world. But if you make up a
| study and data "disproving" climate change and then
| circulate it in Facebook then you're not.
| garg wrote:
| The violent attack on the capitol was the result of fake news
| media without anyone ever inciting violence. They simply need
| to repeat over and over that the election was stolen and that
| caused the violence and people died.
|
| Incorrectly yelling Fire in a crowded theater is illegal and no
| one is inciting violence in that situation either. There are
| many commonalities between broadcasting fake news for profit
| and propaganda, and incorrectly yelling fire in a crowd. Both
| end up resulting in public safety hazards.
|
| It is a difficult problem to deal with because there is always
| the possibility of corruption and a reduction in genuine free
| speech when there is regulation involved. But it is a problem
| that has to be solved.
|
| It is also no longer social media only, it is Fox, OANN,
| NewsMax, Sinclair, etc that are increasingly filling up air
| time with lies solely to make a buck.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| The violent attack on the capitol was the result of the
| sitting President of the United States claiming the election
| was stolen and telling them to march on the capitol.
|
| That is decidedly not a social media thing.
|
| Social media gave him the mob, but it was a man with a podium
| that incited the action.
| thrwaway2day wrote:
| > The violent attack on the capitol was the result of the
| sitting President of the United States claiming the
| election was stolen and telling them to march on the
| capitol.
|
| If true, this would be much more convincing with a direct
| quotation and a source, rather than your interpretation.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-
| resolutio...
| PixyMisa wrote:
| > Incorrectly yelling Fire in a crowded theater is illegal
|
| No it's not. See Brandenburg v. Ohio.
| garg wrote:
| It was made more specific in Brandenburg v. Ohio but it was
| not completely overturned. ie, if someone is incorrectly
| yelling fire in a crowded theater which is "speech brigaded
| with action" then it is a situation where a person could be
| prosecuted for speech. They used that very example.
| dnissley wrote:
| > But it is a problem that has to be solved.
|
| Do you think the solution should come from the government? It
| seems implied here but just checking.
| Retric wrote:
| Do you have any other options? I don't care who solves it,
| but when a company is run for the intent to produce
| propaganda it's pointless to ask them to self regulate.
| dnissley wrote:
| There is always the option to let the issue sort itself
| out. To allow space and time for a solution to emerge.
|
| We should be careful not to fall into action bias. E.g.
| the thought that we need to do something, anything, since
| that can lead to counterproductive solutions.
|
| I've begun to look at information problems like this not
| too differently than viruses of thought. Right now these
| viruses are running rampant because we've never had to
| deal with anything like them before on such a wide scale.
| It seems perfectly possible to me that over time we will
| develop social standards that immunize us from these
| viruses. More and more people will begin to disregard
| clickbait, outrage-inducing headlines, etc. They will
| simply become less salient the more and more we
| experience them.
|
| Reframing the question at hand around this metaphor: What
| would an effective vaccine look like for these thought
| viruses? I'm not at all sure, but I can't imagine any
| kind of partisan response that would work, since these
| viruses infect left and right alike, and many people will
| bend over backwards to argue otherwise. Until we can face
| that fact honestly, I don't see how we could even begin
| to have a productive conversation about a solution.
| garg wrote:
| In my previous comment, I am roughly equating incorrectly
| yelling fire in a crowded theater with broadcasting fake
| news to millions of people.
|
| If there were a way to clearly differentiate between free
| speech and fake news, then yes, I would support legal
| ramifications for spreading blatant intentional fake news
| created solely as profitable propaganda that causes harm,
| and treating that as intentionally lying about fire in a
| crowd.
|
| I don't know what the best organization or process for
| setting that up would be. After a certain number of
| complaints, can we transparently look into the owners of
| the news media, their revenue streams, their involvement
| with foreign governments, to determine whether a company is
| a legitimate news source or not? Can we get non-profits and
| media-freedom watchdogs involved to ensure fairness? Can we
| get the fairness doctrine running again? I don't see why
| not.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Take the politics out of it -- unaccountable, unquestioned mass
| communication is almost always bad.
|
| Mass media needs the fairness doctrine back to take the
| carnival show out of the news. Social media is no exception.
|
| The current model basically neuters editorial discretion and
| creates a "Team A" vs "Team B" environment that is bad for
| everyone. These problems started in niche mediums like talk
| radio and eventually locked in because it's an easy way to make
| money. The problem is it's a race to the bottom, and outlets
| like OANN, RT, etc are really self-sustaining propaganda
| outlets. The NY Post has an editorial voice but their news
| product isn't fiction.
|
| On the internet, if you give Facebook, Google, etc rules, they
| will develop algorithms to comply. IMO, regulation in the space
| would improve the quality of engagement and make them money.
| P&G won't buy ads associated with flat earth people, and they
| pay more than the gold coin, prostate pills, crazy pillow
| people, etc.
| PixyMisa wrote:
| The First Amendment forbids any such legislation.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| And thank god for it.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It absolutely does not do any such thing. Speech can be
| well-regulated, just like other constitutional rights. Your
| right to speak does not mandate a megaphone.
|
| What I described was the law from the 1930s until the
| 1980s. Our predecessors saw what happened in fascist and
| communist states and wisely took measures to avoid that.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| > But recently flat out knowingly lying with the specific
| intent of deceiving people has become normalised. It's a
| serious threat.
|
| It's literally propaganda. A Russian tactic called the firehose
| of falsehoods.
|
| The trick is making the truth politically related, so the real
| truth doesn't matter anymore.
|
| And people can just say it's a "x" opinion to dismiss it. It's
| unfortunately pretty effective as we've seen...
| pfisch wrote:
| "That's what they need to address, picking and choosing
| opinions to block is a fig leaf move that's more likely to
| backfire than improve anything."
|
| Counter point - before social media that is exactly how it
| worked for the last 100 years. Newspapers, radio stations and
| tv stations were picking and choosing opinions to block.
|
| This entire problem is actually being caused by the total
| removal of editorial discretion from sane people.
| randmeerkat wrote:
| You can't swear on television, you can't yell fire in a theater,
| you can't criticise your company on your device after hours on
| Twitter, a gay couple can't have a cake baked, a woman can't even
| show her nipples, but that kind of censorship isn't on the front
| page of hacker news...
|
| Because what people really care about is that the media outlets
| that participated in a violent insurrection can continue to spew
| their hate and lies without consequence.
| rayiner wrote:
| The letter complains about Fox and OANN's partisan and
| inflammatory rhetoric, with supporting citations to sources on
| the left who trade heavily in partisan and inflammatory rhetoric.
| Just three citations in you get to Karen Attiah, Washington
| Post's Global Opinions Editor:
| https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jun/29/karen-attia...
|
| > "White women are lucky that we are just calling them 'Karen's,'
| and not calling for revenge," Ms. Attiah tweeted to her 185,000
| followers Sunday evening.
|
| > "Non, je ne regrette rien," she wrote in another tweet, making
| it clear she had no regrets.
|
| Regarding misinformation, Rachel Maddow has suffered no negative
| consequences for jumping on every Trump-related conspiracy theory
| to pop up in the last four years:
| https://taibbi.substack.com/p/why-rachel-maddow-is-on-the-co...
|
| > From there, the floodgates opened. "Commentary television is
| not news," snapped David Cay Johnston of the New York Times,
| himself just days removed from saying on Democracy Now! that "I
| think [Trump] is a Russian agent."
|
| > He added: "Rachel Maddow in particular has certainly pushed the
| Mueller matter," doing so in conjunction with "the facts at the
| time." However, he said, her work was "driven by the commercial
| values of television."
|
| It's fair to say that Maddow has an opinion show, not a news
| show. But that distinction doesn't seem to matter to the
| Congresspeople who wrote the letter here--they suggest censoring
| Fox News, which accurately reported the election results and
| Supreme Court developments. The conspiracy theories, such as they
| were, came from some of the opinion hosts.
|
| Make no mistake. Whether it's "inflammatory" speech or
| "misinformation"--these rules will not be applied even-handedly.
| Such rules are not even amenable to even-handed application.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > It's fair to say that Maddow has an opinion show, not a news
| show.
|
| The general format (it is varied from occasionally) is a
| commentary/interview show that uses news stories, generally
| presented as straight news and to journalistic standards, to
| provide context for the interviews and commentary.
|
| > these rules
|
| Who has proposed rules?
| scythe wrote:
| >The letter complains about Fox and OANN's partisan and
| inflammatory rhetoric,
|
| >they suggest censoring Fox News, which accurately reported the
| election results and Supreme Court developments. The conspiracy
| theories, such as they were, came from some of the opinion
| hosts.
|
| It's hard to believe we're at this point, but Fox is on a
| different level from OANN. You can find counterpoints on Fox
| News. OANN/Breitbart/the Mercer family media empire are a new,
| more vicious and fantasy-driven right-populism.
|
| If the right would keep its own house in order, you'd see less
| appetite for restrictions on the left. You need a boogeyman to
| sell this kind of thing. I can see your WaPo editor (in the
| _private sector_ ) and raise you plenty of Republican
| Congressmembers posing with rifles and Lindsey Graham trying to
| employ Brad Raffensperger. The worst left-wing "counterpart" is
| probably Maxine Waters's mean words.
| rayiner wrote:
| What's wrong with posing with rifles in response to a
| President that's making noise about gun control?
| jolux wrote:
| >I don't really care what inflammatory things people post in
| their free time. But make no mistake that there will be double
| standards in how these rules will be applied.
|
| This seems like a red herring though? These letters are talking
| about the statements that news sources make as official
| outlets, to which you're comparing statements an individual
| makes (presumably) on her own time. I don't deny that there's a
| potential for double standards here, but I think you would have
| to show that misinformation in the Washington Post is
| comparable to misinformation on OANN or Newsmax to show that
| one is being applied in this instance.
| edbob wrote:
| Honestly, this isn't any more helpful than responding
| "citation needed" to someone asserting that man-made causes
| will accelerate climate change. The inevitability of the
| abuse of political power is not something that has to be
| debated over and over again in every thread.
| jolux wrote:
| >The inevitability of the abuse of political power is not
| something that has to be debated over and over again in
| every thread.
|
| I don't contest this, what I contest is the idea that there
| is comparable misinformation on both sides. rayiner has
| since updated his post with some examples that he thinks
| constitute misinformation by news sources themselves, but
| before the only example given was the tweets from the
| Washington Times link.
| edbob wrote:
| I responded about the future because the quote you
| disagreed said "there _will_ be ", and I think the
| general tone of discussion here is around the potential
| future for abuse. We've seen notable comments by
| Democratic voters who are legitimately afraid of what
| their party will become. In this context, I'm not sure if
| current comparisons of misinformation are very relevant.
|
| Having explained my thinking, I'll make sure to
| respectfully engage with yours. I do see the point about
| both sides not being equal in misinformation. But I think
| that a lot of the apparent difference comes from bias.
| There are several liberal narratives that are as baseless
| as anything in QAnon, and others that are partially
| factually accurate but framed in very misleading ways.
| But as these are accepted and promulgated in mainstream
| media, they are not considered fringe misinformation. I
| think there may still be greater fault on the "right" in
| misinformation, but it's not nearly as large as it
| appears to people in a liberal bubble, and, moreover,
| that disparity can shift overnight. I don't really want
| to derail this into a debate about those political
| narratives, so I probably have to leave it at that.
| jolux wrote:
| I agree that the potential for future abuse of a power to
| regulate misinformation is high. That does not
| necessarily mean that it outweighs the current value, but
| I think reasonable people can disagree about this and I
| think it's a debate we should be having, given the events
| of 1/6.
|
| I don't want to get into an argument about which side is
| worse here or whether they're equivalent. Suffice it to
| say, we have different perspectives and I don't think
| discussing that is enlightening here.
| edbob wrote:
| Thank you for the respectful discussion. I feel like I
| understand your position a lot more clearly now.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| _what I contest is the idea that there is comparable
| misinformation on both sides_
|
| I don't see that we need to even consider the question of
| parity. Saying that one side or another is worse, and
| therefore requires special attention, is wrong: it's
| false that only the worst offender should be policed.
|
| All sides should be subject to the same rules, whether
| they're doing it a lot or just a little. My personal
| philosophy is that for all sides, the remedy is to
| encourage more information to shine light on the
| falsehoods, rather than trying to gag any ideas.
| jolux wrote:
| >All sides should be subject to the same rules, whether
| they're doing it a lot or just a little.
|
| Sure, absolutely.
|
| >Saying that one side or another is worse, and therefore
| requires special attention, is wrong: it's false that
| only the worst offender should be policed.
|
| This is not my position, I just disagree that the "left-
| wing" media outlets that rayiner identified are
| materially engaged in misinformation in the same way that
| the outlets identified in these letters are.
|
| But I also don't really want to litigate this question,
| as it's a recipe for a flame war.
|
| >My personal philosophy is that for all sides, the remedy
| is to encourage more information to shine light on the
| falsehoods, rather than trying to gag any ideas.
|
| In general I agree, but we're in a state of exception
| right now. Since 1/6, certain ideas have now proved
| themselves to be dangerous to (small-d) democratic rule.
| I don't think this is an easy question to answer, or I
| would be giving the easy answer, instead of asking the
| question: what actions are legitimate in this instance to
| preserve democracy, and do they include regulating the
| speech of institutions which reject majority rule? Karl
| Popper has an answer here, but I'm a pretty strict
| constitutionalist and a strong believer in freedom of
| speech, so I can't unreservedly suggest the government
| should intervene.
| rayiner wrote:
| I absolutely agree there is a distinction in general.
| However, I don't think that distinction applies to the
| Twitter posts of a blue-checkmark journalist. The news
| outlets themselves are heavily involved in Twitter, and
| Attiah prominently advertises her Washington Post affiliation
| on her Twitter account.
|
| Her affiliation with a prominent media company is why she has
| a blue checkmark: https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-
| account/about-twit...
|
| > Notable Your account must represent or otherwise be
| associated with a prominently recognized individual or brand,
| in line with the notability criteria described below.
|
| > News organizations and journalists: Any official accounts
| of qualifying news organizations, as well individual accounts
| of journalists employed by qualifying organizations may be
| verified, if the account is public (does not have protected
| Tweets) and refers directly to the name and official URL of
| the qualifying organization and otherwise meets the criteria
| laid out in this policy
| jolux wrote:
| > While I agree there is a distinction, I don't think that
| distinction applies to the Twitter posts of a journalist.
|
| We can disagree on this, but it's absolutely a question of
| current debate and not something that is settled. Some
| journalists believe themselves to have freedom on Twitter
| that they do not have in their columns. Some have been
| fired for assuming as such. Others have not.
| bradford wrote:
| > Whether it's "inflammatory" speech or "misinformation"--these
| rules will not be applied even-handedly.
|
| When one source of disinformation has a contribution to
| negative outcomes, It's going to draw more scrutiny. As long as
| that happens regardless of content-origin, it's the kind of
| even-handedness that I'd hope for.
|
| You mention Maddow, and, while I don't watch her, If her show's
| content possibly contributed to a putsch, I'd hope that someone
| would look into it.
|
| Media has been full of crazy for decades now and authorities
| typically look the other way until some significant event
| occurs. January 6th was very significant, and if
| Fox/oann/newsmax had a role in it, I'd like to know. Bringing
| up Maddow and other opinion sources seem like whataboutism
| here.
| gist wrote:
| > It's fair to say that Maddow has an opinion show, not a news
| show.
|
| With many of these shows is they are a bit of 'looks like a
| duck quacks like a duck'. By that I mean the format and the
| presentation look as if they are not opinion but possibly fact
| and/or news. This can be manipulated by both the format,
| graphics, presentation of 'experts' and so on.
|
| CNN does this as well with some opinion shows, Chris Cuomo, Don
| Lemon, Anderson Cooper, Erin Burnett. Many people will take
| them as authoritative typically because it's a professional
| presentation on a 'major' network. Most when I have spot
| watched do not even present an opposing or counter view a topic
| being discussed. And they often present a well credentialed
| person to support the pov they are taking.
| cwkoss wrote:
| MSNBC is just as partisan and loose with the truth as fox news,
| but with a centrist liberal perspective. CNN seems slightly
| better, but they have a lot of questionable reporting and
| analysis as well.
| e40 wrote:
| I think the magnitude of the lies on the Fox side is far
| larger than those on the CNBC side.
|
| Magnitude matters in this case and painting them with "both
| sides" arguments is a huge disservice.
| cwkoss wrote:
| I don't watch MSNBC (or any TV news for that matter), but
| I'm curious how their reporting has changed since Biden was
| sworn in. It's easier to report facts that 'speak truth to
| power' when your bias is opposed to who currently holds
| power.
|
| Biden has delayed, compromised on, or walked back nearly
| every campaign promise he made. Has MSNBC been calling out
| these discrepancies between campaign rhetoric and
| implementation? I would be surprised if they were making
| substantive criticism of the Biden administration.
| drak0n1c wrote:
| MSNBC has a consistent history of misinformation
| contributing to the highly polarized environment today.
|
| Here is a video showing how MSNBC purposefully cropped
| footage of an armed protester at an Obama townhall to hide
| his race (he was black), and used the clip to immediately
| launch into a discussion claiming that town hall protesters
| were motivated by racism. Soon after that media cycle my
| peers in college started assuming that most criticism of
| Obama is motivated by racism. These kinds of attitudes
| directly contributed to the current culture war of bad
| faith ostracism and tribalism.
|
| https://youtu.be/fvBQDHqdCck?t=130
|
| Remember, a left wing activist also took violent action and
| shot up Congressmen at a baseball field. The argument of a
| "sufficient level" of misinformation and/or butterfly-
| effect-violence can be used to justify arbitrary
| intimidation and censorship against any outlet.
| rayiner wrote:
| > think the magnitude of the lies on the Fox side is far
| larger than those on the CNBC side.
|
| It's not a scaler. There is the overt-ness of the lie, as
| well as the significance of the lie. Fox gives air to some
| significant and bald-faced lies. MSNBC gives air to a lot
| of misconceptions that are monumental in scope but less
| bald-faced. On the flip side, the journalism side of Fox
| stood up to the bald-faced lie about the election. Nobody
| at MSNBC never stands up to the less bald-faced
| misconceptions aired on that network.
|
| With respect to elections. Trump made up a big lie about
| one election that Fox's news side pushed back on, and which
| some opinion commenters face air too. MSNBC has given air
| to less bold lies about election integrity ever since 2000.
| How many people know from watching left-leaning media that
| 7 of 9 justices, with two Democrats agreeing with five
| Republicans, thought the Florida recount was
| unconstitutional?
|
| In other examples, look at COVID response. Do you think
| people watching CNN have an accurate idea of where US COVID
| deaths stands in comparison to similar countries?
| CivBase wrote:
| _> Experts have noted that the right-wing media ecosystem is
| "much more susceptible...to disinformation, lies, and half-
| truths."_
|
| Citation from the PDF:
| https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/o...
|
| That book does not cite any evidence for that assertion.
|
| Here's the relevant excerpt:
|
| > IN THE PRECEDING three chapters we examined the propaganda
| feedback loop, how it forms, and how it facilitates
| disinformation and the manipulation of beliefs of a population.
| But our observations about the highly asymmetric nature of the
| American media environment, and the survey-based evidence we
| described in Chapter 2, which suggests that no more than 30
| percent of the American population inhabits the insular,
| propaganda-rich right-wing media ecosystem, indicate that
| whatever one thinks of the result of the 2016 election, it could
| not have been purely the result of right-wing propaganda. Here,
| we identify two central attributes of mainstream media and
| professional journalism--balance and the scoop culture--that
| shaped election coverage, and in some cases made them
| particularly susceptible to being manipulated into spreading
| right-wing propaganda.
|
| _> As a violent mob was breaching the doors of the Capitol,
| Newsmax's coverage called the scene a "sort of a romantic idea."_
|
| That's not misinformation. That's just a dumb opinion.
|
| _> Fox News, meanwhile, has spent years spewing misinformation
| about American politics._
|
| Citation from the PDF: https://www.vox.com/recode/22219026/fox-
| news-riot-capitol-ma...
|
| That article is all about how Fox News has been talked for months
| after the election about how it " _could_ have been stolen "
| (emphasis from Vox). It also speculates about Fox News's strategy
| going forward. That is not even close to "years spewing
| misinformation about American politics".
|
| _> A media watchdog found over 250 cases of COVID-19
| misinformation on Fox News in just one five-day period_
|
| Citation from the PDF: https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-
| covid-19/fox-news-p...
|
| These sorts of counting articles always rub me the wrong way.
| They count multiple instances of the same misinformation and tend
| to play fast and loose with the definition of "misinformation" to
| get the count as high as possible. Of the few cases cited in the
| article, most of them are dumb opinions and baseless conjectures.
|
| _> and economists demonstrated that Fox News had a demonstrable
| impact on non-compliance with public health guidelines_
|
| Citation from the PDF: https://doi.org/10.3386/w27237
|
| From the cited study:
|
| _> Meanwhile, Fox News maintained its stance against the
| lockdown and SD and, in April, a "slew of Fox News opinion hosts
| and anchors [were] pushing back on public health experts and
| urging President Donald Trump to abandon its social distancing
| policies and reopen the economy" (Relman, 2020). Therefore, our
| Fox News effects arise and persist throughout a period when Fox
| News repeatedly broadcast anti-SD content that was contrary to
| the recommendations of the White House._
|
| The study itself attributes Fox News's influence on non-
| compliance to their disagreements regarding lockdown and social
| distancing policies. The study accuses Fox News of broadcasting
| misinformation by virtue of sharing disagreements with the
| recommendations of health experts.
| jandrese wrote:
| > no more than 30 percent of the American population inhabits
| the insular, propaganda-rich right-wing media ecosystem,
| indicate that whatever one thinks of the result of the 2016
| election, it could not have been purely the result of right-
| wing propaganda.
|
| 30% of the total American population could be 46% of the voting
| population. But this is a straw man argument, it would only
| take 1 counter example to disprove a statement like that, and
| you could certainly find a person like that.
|
| The comment about how Fox News has not spent years spewing
| misinformation simply because it is only talking about "Stop
| the Steal" nonsense is missing the forest for the trees. You
| can find examples of baseless hyperbolic fearmongering on Fox
| News every year (and indeed every month) going back to its
| inception. Migrant caravans about to overrun our borders. BLM
| protestors setting entire cities on fire. Secret pedophiles
| operating out of fast food restaurants.
| CivBase wrote:
| > The comment about how Fox News has not spent years spewing
| misinformation simply because it is only talking about "Stop
| the Steal" nonsense is missing the forest for the trees.
|
| I rarely watch anything from Fox News, so I wouldn't know.
| The point is the Vox article cited in the letter does not
| back up the statement made. If it's as bad as you say, surely
| there must be a better source to cite.
|
| Regardless of any issues with Fox News, Newsmax, or OANN,
| this letter was lazily written and obviously partisan. It
| makes many strong statements but fails to back them up with
| the given sources. The way it and its sources haphazardly
| throws around the term "misinformation" are concerning,
| especially when combined with the discomforting notion that
| telecom companies should be worried their content isn't
| meeting the expectations of government officials.
| jandrese wrote:
| There are volumes written about the subject already.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_controversies#Studie
| s...
|
| For example:
|
| https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/10/study-
| explore...
| CivBase wrote:
| Then it shouldn't have been difficult for professional
| representatives of the House to find a good source.
| rayiner wrote:
| Maybe you could say that the authors of those sources were
| pushing misinformation?
| ianai wrote:
| This discussion does HN a disservice.
|
| Further the comments reflect a prior, thoroughly editorialized
| title.
| gfodor wrote:
| Pay attention.
| [deleted]
| kirillzubovsky wrote:
| House Democrats are trying to dictate what is allowed to air by
| wrapping it into a freedoom-fighting blanket. That's disgusting.
| If you want the standards to apply to someone else, apply them to
| yourself first.
|
| This is just political theatre.
| citilife wrote:
| This is such a dangerous game to play.
|
| CNN knowingly misleads the public every single day. It's
| effectively public knowledge if anyone cares to investigate
| themselves.
|
| Going after FOX because the ruling party disagrees with them, but
| leaving CNN alone is the definition of authoritarian, regardless
| of your views. You can't single out voices.
|
| Further, who owns CNN? (Turner Broadcasting System)
|
| Who owns Turner Broadcasting System? (WarnerMedia)
|
| Who owns WarnerMedia? (AT&T)
|
| Interesting... so AT&T is being lobbied not to carry its
| competition, while leaving its own broadcasting alone.
| [deleted]
| ntsplnkv2 wrote:
| Trump continually attacked the media, Trump literally said the
| media was the enemy of the people. He would ignore questions
| from other agencies, even those without bias.
|
| Until people in their own parties start standing up for
| principled government it will never change.
|
| Unsurprisingly, downvoted for stating facts once again - people
| are afraid to call a spade a spade.
| buildbot wrote:
| Reading these threads has been very depressing lately,
| Democrats ask OANN and other _extremely_ conservative
| networks for information, and that's somehow an attack on the
| First Amendment, where as 4 years of Trump - and the rest of
| the Republican party - attacking anything he disagreed with
| as Fake News was totally cool.
|
| Either Hacker news is being heavily astroturfed (there are
| many throwaway accounts participating here for example) or
| really that's what this community is now.
|
| I just keep a little personal list of usernames of people who
| are promoting Fascism and avoid anything they are associated
| with.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Respectfully, I don't really see anyone saying that false
| accusations of fake news were cool. I'm concerned that you
| might be stuck in a mindset of partisan battle, where
| anyone who expresses concerns about this letter is
| declaring themselves to be on the other team from the
| people who wrote it.
| buildbot wrote:
| Expressing concerns is great, and I support those
| comments. Reflecting on what you said, it's true that
| pointing out an issue here does not imply political
| affiliation to either side, but it's sorta funny how much
| more volume there is about this?
|
| In terms of supporting racism, Specifically what I'm
| referring to are attempts to paint 1/6 as overblown or
| somehow was an acceptable event. Framing is really
| important - people here are claiming the only "real"
| death was "an unarmed protestor", ignoring that the
| person was shot attempting to break down the door to
| where the members of the House were actively evacuating
| from; and that somehow the suicides after the event or
| the deaths from the stress during the event don't count
| as real deaths.
| cozuya wrote:
| When did CNN viewers storm the capitol in attempt to overthrow
| the elected government, leading to the deaths of 7 people?
| citilife wrote:
| There's actually a lot of clips of CNN & other reporters
| helping and pushing protesters into the Capital Building...
|
| https://twitter.com/LaurenWitzkeDE/status/134990457311734169.
| ..
|
| Also, only two persons died of wounds confirmed at the
| Capital (both protestors). The only person who was shot, was
| recorded by the "reporter" in the video above was egging on
| the police & protestors at the time.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/01/16/sullivan-
| vi...
|
| Further, regarding the "7 deaths" two additional people died
| from a stroke and heart attack going to the Capital.
|
| Yes, there were then three additional fatalities in the
| _days_ following the event. None of those deaths were linked
| back to the Capital building in a meaningful way (including
| the officer). While facts and the evidence can change, the
| current facts do not support the claims being made.
| cozuya wrote:
| Lauren Witzke is a Q Anon supporter. Do you think Q Anon
| supporters should be given a voice here on HN?
|
| Also, why does it matter how many people died during the
| attempt to overthrow our government by far right
| extremists? How many deaths are acceptable? 1? 7?
| citilife wrote:
| > Lauren Witzke is a Q Anon supporter. Do you think Q
| Anon supporters should be given a voice here on HN?
|
| Sure, I believe everyone deserves a voice? Kind of weird
| to say that.
|
| Further, it's the content of the video that matters.
| There was nothing Q related in the tweet.
|
| > Also, why does it matter how many people died during
| the attempt to overthrow our government by far right
| extremists? How many deaths are acceptable? 1? 7?
|
| (1) The previous post has a video of far left extremist
| perpetrating the storming of the Capital.
|
| (2) I'm not arguing any fatalities are acceptable. I'm
| simply pointing out the figures are inaccurate; which is
| important because we need to have a basis of facts to
| have discussions. Facts, which are currently being
| exaggerated for political ends.
| whydoibother wrote:
| You are liar.
| cozuya wrote:
| Everyone deserves a voice? A group of people (QAnons) who
| believe their prominent political opponents should be
| murdered deserves a voice?
|
| What is "weird" about thinking that they should not be
| given a voice here on Hacker News?
|
| Wow.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| By CNN, you mean an independent (QAnon-pushing) documentary
| filmmaker, who was egging on an alt-right activist? This
| one has been debunked.
|
| > Yes, there were then three additional fatalities in the
| _days_ following the event. None of those deaths were
| linked back to the Capital building in a meaningful way
| (including the officer).
|
| Oh, you're going to have to try harder than that. Just
| because there was no indication that, specifically, "blunt
| force trauma was the immediate cause of death of [Officer
| Sicknick]" doesn't mean anything close to "None of those
| deaths were linked back to the Capital building in a
| meaningful way".
|
| CPR being performed on him. A hemorrhagic stroke within
| hours, a ventilator (multiple pepper sprayings), and death
| within 24 hours. All factors that you say "eh, coincidence"
| to.
| ak217 wrote:
| Please don't post disinformation here.
| https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-9906367046
| citilife wrote:
| I agree, you should stop posting fact checkers and
| instead look at the government report linked in the post
| I linked.
|
| The man recording the video was repeatedly on CNN/NBC/etc
| sharing his story... also Jade was an independent photo
| journalist who's clients include: CNN, NBC, etc.
|
| https://www.jadesacker.com/about
|
| This "fact checker" appears to be a bias journalist, I
| recommend checking the facts yourself. You don't need
| someone telling you what is real vs not, they dont'
| provide links in the AP article.
|
| While I think it's fair to say they aren't "CNN
| journalists", they are employed by CNN as effectively
| contract workers.
| retromario wrote:
| > None of those deaths were linked back to the Capital
| building in a meaningful way (including the officer).
|
| That is simply false.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/police-
| of...
| JamisonM wrote:
| Jade Sacker doesn't work for CNN.
| https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-woman-
| capitol-n...
|
| Feels like you are just getting played and then propagating
| your problems further here.
| citilife wrote:
| https://www.jadesacker.com/about
|
| Her client list includes CNN, NBC, etc.
|
| Yes, she's an independent photographer who is often under
| contract with CNN, NBC, etc. Not clear if she was at the
| time, tbh.
|
| That wasn't exactly my only point, the way the industry
| works -- CNN, NBC, etc buy content from people who go
| into dangerous situations. So these people are in-effect
| the "journalists". In her case, I don't know if she was
| credentialed or not, but given her lack of arrest (as far
| as we can tell), she likely was.
| JamisonM wrote:
| Complaining about the press being fast and loose with the
| facts while being fast and loose with the facts yourself
| is your choice.
| xster wrote:
| It's also funny looking at sources that they're referencing
| Comcast (vox.com/NBCUniversal) to tell Comcast (Xfinity TV) to
| censor certain contents. There is no government.
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