
Criminalize Fake News - joelx
https://joelx.com/criminalize-fake-news/14559/
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smt88
Non-US dictatorships are doing this now. They use it as a tool to crack down
on dissent. It's a patently terrible idea to criminalize something where it's
impossible to prove intent.

~~~
soganess
Seriously! I usually try to avoid news-related articles, but this time I'll
bite.

When are we going to stop striving for some utopian perfection that is not
there and instead realize/accept that most codified valuation have a conjugate
trade off that can't be messaged away.

I know I'm not saying anything interesting here, but it bears repeating, there
is probably no set of laws that (1) has strong protections put in place to
resist abuse (2) is going to truly champion free speech and (3) still have
real world protections against fake news that can't be easily circumvented.

What's the difference between a interest-group paid authoritatively-toned
opinion-piece and fake news? How much of the former are you willing to
nondiscriminatory censor to ensure squashing the later? What is the
social/economic blow-black for that censorship?

Said another way, at what point does omitting facts become misrepresentation?
And how many people's livelihoods are you willing to bet on the quality of
your distinction?

When it comes to fake news, I'm as disgusted as the next person, but not every
misuse of free speech deserves the special legislation that we grant to hate
speech.

~~~
yayana
I'm confused, I would be perfectly happy to stop people from making a
livelihood out of writing a "interest-group paid authoritatively-toned
opinion-piece" if there were a safe way to do so without damaging other
rights.

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nabla9
Sounds simple but is super complicated.

Showing that something is done purposefully and knowingly instead of
negligently and recklessly is hard. It limits the practical enforcement even
in the existing false reporting statutes.

Freedom of speech protects strongly from prior restraint (aka pre-publication
censorship) and allows people and media to say anything, but there can be
legal consequences in many cases. There are the "yelling fire in the crowded
movie theater" type cases that lead to convictions when someone has been
instigating panic, riots or violence in the social media.

Something like "the migrant caravan" can be safely used as a false news
because the news is technically true, it's just exaggerated beyond any reason.

Proper journalism relies on anonymous sources and sometimes journalists are
duped when they report something not checked from multiple sources. Legal risk
from doing your work would make live unnecessarily difficult.

~~~
CM30
Yeah, it's really hard to tell what's deliberate and what isn't with false
information. I mean, many people would say the likes of Info Wars is fake
news, but... I'm pretty sure Jones and co are crazy enough to believe much of
what they pubish there.

And given that a lot of media outlets also make mistakes, well it feels like
such a situation would basically just make anyone publishing anything
absolutely paranoid about ever being 'wrong', which wouldn't really make
things any better.

~~~
luckylion
> I'm pretty sure Jones and co are crazy enough to believe much of what they
> pubish there.

I don't believe Jones himself does, but maybe some contributors do. However:
(some of) the audience definitely believes it. When they reproduce it, they do
so with the best intentions.

I agree regarding mistakes - otoh, being paranoid about making mistakes might
be a good thing in today's media. Public shaming (by their competitors) isn't
happening / working, that might be a good side effect.

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gmiller123456
>The only reason for this was they read one news source and I read another.

There's your problem. If you were both unbiased, I would assume that you both
went back to your news sources and found out which one was misleading. Then
whoever was relying on the unreliable news source, changed their news source.
They shared that info with other people, and that unreliable new source is now
out of business.

Since it's a pretty safe bet that such a thing did not happen, it should be
obvious that you're the problem. Personally I could not fathom accepting any
news organization's account of any topic as unbiased and complete. For most of
those stories, I don't care, they don't affect my opinions. But for things
that do matter, I deliberately seek out opposing opinions and see if they can
make a convincing argument.

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CM30
The problems with any law or system against 'fake news' can basically be
summed up as follows:

1\. As said, how do you prove intent? Everyone is wrong about something, and
some people are literally insane. Any attempt to prove it beyond the most
obvious cases (aka admissions of lying/trolling) would be exceedingly
difficult, likely catch out many otherwise legitimate media outlets and end up
basically punishing people for making mistakes/being dumb/being insane.

2\. Who determines what's fake and how do they do it? Any censoring system is
ripe for abuse, and will be co-opted by political fanatics to 'punish' the
other side at the earliest opportunity. Don't think many people would trust
the Trump administration to make this sort of judgement. Nor would anyone sane
trust any sort of government institution.

3\. Even if you do somehow get a neutral third party, you get into the
question of what counts as 'fake news'. Satire is obviously fine, but pretty
much every site classed as 'fake news' now claims to be writing satire.

So you then get stuck trying to decide what can 'legitimately' be called
satire and how that should be identified. Do you need a giant label on every
satirical article now?

You also get stuck in heavily contentious areas where the 'truth' isn't
exactly some obvious thing that all sides have agreed on. There's a pretty big
spectrum between saying something that's objectively false (like, the Earth is
flat) and something extremely contentious (X religion/belief is right, here's
a explanation of the causes behind the Arab Israeli conflict, etc).

Some stuff is so heavily debated that people could give you a dozen studies,
anecodes and case studies for any argument you want.

Either way, it just seems like a bad idea that has the potential to cause more
problems that it solves.

~~~
clairity
these are strong points.

i wonder if there can be some kind of (potentially algorithmic) metric that
tells us how much of an article is unsubstantiated? we already have opinion
pieces and editorials as categories. can we use such categorizations to
indicate some measure of trustworthiness of a given article?

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equalunique
Criminalizing it would lead to proceedings in a court of law, which might
actually help in definitively establishing a narrative of truth.
Unfortunately, I am not confident that even courts can be relied upon to be
unbiased.

Comments echoing the author's sentiment here are all over the NYT story
concerning the fake "Russian Disinfo Campaign" for Roy Moore orchestrated by
the friendly-sounding "Democracy Integrity Project" which broke 1 month ago:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/alabama-senate-roy-
jon...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/alabama-senate-roy-jones-
russia.html#commentsContainer)

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aaron_m04
How about this instead?

* teach critical thinking and how to compare sources

* promote news organizations that are funded by individual donations or subscriptions (for instance, The Guardian).

~~~
luckylion
> teach critical thinking and how to compare sources

I want to say "good plan", but turning everybody into journalists defeats the
idea of specialization. We do regulate how to build houses so that you don't
need to become an architect, structural engineer, masonry expert etc to judge
whether those you paid to do the job did it well. If you really go deep, you'd
need to become a medium expert on lots of topics to judge the accuracy of an
article. That doesn't sound feasible.

The government promoting certain news organizations does sound like a bad idea
to me. And are there even many that don't have any ads? The Guardian certainly
has, and they sell user data.

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peter_d_sherman
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech)

"I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right
to say it" -Alternatively attributed to Patrick Henry, Voltaire, and Evelyn
Beatrice Hall

Besides... who gets to determine what fake news is, what if they're wrong, and
what happens when they decide that fake news is real news, and real news is
the fake news?

Teaching people critical thinking skills, one by one, while respecting
everyone else's right to believe and say what they want, while difficult, is
the far more virtuous path...

Also... Freedom of Religion implies Freedom of Belief...

Oh, almost forgot... Asking for criminalization of Fake News is exactly
functionally equivalent to Censorship.

Censorship has quite the history... The Roman Empire practiced it, the
historic Catholic Church practiced it, and the Chinese Government practices it
today.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship#History)

If history is to be believed, Censorship is far worse than Fake News...

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api
I had a similar thought a while ago, but mine was that being lied to could be
considered a tort.

So if someone labels something as news and I investigate it and discover that
it isn't true, I could sue them for misinforming me.

~~~
fuzz4lyfe
I believe you need to prove a monetary loss of some kind to have standing to
sue. The situations that I can think of that result from misinformation that
cause a monetary loss are probably already considered fraud.

~~~
api
You can sue for slander, libel, sex abuse, defamation, etc., right? How can
you always prove a monetary loss in those cases?

Also I wasn't necessarily suggesting it's actionable today but that maybe
"tortious misinformation" _should_ be.

~~~
fuzz4lyfe
In the case of slander, defamation and libel you have to prove that the words
caused you harm, for example you lost a job due to a lie. A simple lie isn't
enough to sue. A childish example: "HN user api loves to eat poop" isn't
actionable unless you lose money because of it and because a reasonable reader
knows that I'm not serious.

Sex abuse is clear, it causes damage to a person in a similar way if you
assaulted them physically. Costs of therapy, medication and damages due to the
loss of enjoyment of life can be clearly presented.

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towaway1138
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%3F)

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porpoisely
In other words, be like the soviet union, communist china, british empire and
nazi germany? Governments should decide what is fake news? So every 4 or 8
years, we are going to have a new definition of "fake news"? No thanks.

I can't believe there are people advocating for government censorship. So we
are okay with Trump shutting down CNN? And then in 2 or 6 years when another
government comes into power, they'll shut down their version of fake news?

