
Facebook labelled 'digital gangsters' by report on fake news - d0ne
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/18/facebook-fake-news-investigation-report-regulation-privacy-law-dcms
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liquidise
What happens to a generation raised in a world where misinformation is
criminalized? Does critical thinking lapse? Do people just assume all
published works are authoritative by definition? Not an experiment i’d care to
see played out.

The current fake news tug-o-war might actually make citizens more scrutinizing
of their news, not less.

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Const-me
Critical thinking doesn't scale.

I can only apply critical thinking to my area of expertise, software
development, and a few others I happen to have experience outside work. When I
read stuff about unrelated matters like art, medicine, psychology, or
politics, I only have some heuristics to detect obvious BS or bad actors, but
they are very inaccurate because I'm not an expert.

~~~
pjc50
More to the point, you can't apply "critical thinking" to a statement in
isolation. You can only apply it using the context of things that you already
know, or other sources you can get at. If trust in those is destroyed, it
becomes genuinely impossible to know things.

(If you want a not too controversial example of this, look at popular
nutritional science, which is a battleground of constantly shifting ideas and
discredited experiments)

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DyslexicAtheist
The actual report by the UK Parliament is here:

[https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmcu...](https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmcumeds/1791/1791.pdf)

The "list or conclusions and recommendations" on pages 89-98 are worth
studying though, see:

[https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmcu...](https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmcumeds/1791/179112.htm#_idTextAnchor082)

Now provided we agree that regulation is the correct way to solve this, why
not regulate instead AdTech? This seems to address the root of the problem,
rather than trusting AI will fix it (as is the promise by the big players) and
forcing everyone else (whoever is left on the free web ... and running on old
stacks like phpforum for a fringe community ... OR those who aren't convinced
that AI is a solution) to burden them with _what looks like_ a "Ministry of
Truth" type of regulatory body. These might as well just take down the
community/service (because it never made money anyway and now it's just too
much of a burden).

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partiallypro
I'm more concerned about government intervention into speech and policing what
is appropriate than I am fake news, which a recent study showed wasn't even
that widespread.

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happytoexplain
Can you link the study? As far as I'm aware, even a relatively small
proportion of misleading news, if it hits the right political nerves, could
cause real damage to a society, so I'm interested in how the study defines
"not that widespread", and what the implications of that are.

~~~
partiallypro
[http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586.full](http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586.full)

Funny enough the headline the media took from this study was that older people
shared fake news more...you probably saw that part everywhere. What they
didn't share is that the study says it is actually pretty rare in every age
group.

