Sure, but who does a politician sue when “Q” comes out and says they’re a goat-fucker? That’s the problem I see- if there’s not quite a clear enough suit for slander or libel, or not an actual defendant to sue, how do you respond?
Really the bigger problem is if you give the government the power to decide what is and what isn’t “news”, then you basically give someone like Trump the ability to ban every news source that isn’t Fox News.
Could you come up with an industry council of some kind- i.e. all news agencies(web, print,radio) get a seat at the table and they vet each other/censure each other as needed. Kind of like the NCAA maybe.
The important thing would be to get the more reputable right-wing outlets like Fox on board, and then go after the clearly disinformational ones.
That way, it’s not a governmental action, but more of a stamp of disapproval / stamp of untrustworthiness. It’s not going to convince a lunatic, but it might make someone think who’s considering going down that rabbit hole, if it’s not in the internal industry watchdog organization that 1236 out of 1290 self-proclaimed news organizations are in.
You may not be able to track down Q. But, you can certainly track down those media outlets that repeat this rumor.
And sure, they can get around it a bit by just “reporting” on information, like saying, “Q says that Mr. Politician fucks goats.” but that would pretty much have to be the only way that they could transmit that info.
That’s kinda what we had. They didn’t censure eachother, but they certainly vetted.
There was little that a media company loved more than to point out that one of their competitors was wrong. It’s why they used to take retractions seriously, if they found out that they had reported incorrectly, then they wanted to admit it and fix that before someone else called them out on it.
Fox broke that model, by not having any embarrassment at all about reporting incorrectly. Other outlets would point out their errors, and they would shrug and go on. After a while, it became a badge of honor to be “corrected” by their competitors, ending up driving a wedge in reality itself, do you believe Fox, or do you believe these “fake news” that keep calling them out?
I’m not sure what you do when people have chosen to believe the lies, and think that those putting the stamp of disapproval/untrustworthiness are the liars themselves.
That Fox is considered to be “more reputable” is a sorry state of affairs. There really aren’t reputable, they only are by comparison to Newsmax or OANN. But, if Fox comes aboard, then they just become part of the “fake news” the lamestream media. How much flak did they take just for calling Arizona for Biden? People were leaving them in droves the moment they called Biden the president elect.
People will choose what to believe, and what media to consume, and I’m not sure what can be done about that.
Agreed.
As I say, I think the solution can only be a system where news agencies are as hesitant to make up shit about, say, Sandy Hook, as they are about a private company. We’ve seen even Newsmax climb down from the election “steal” thing because of fear of being sued.
Keep freedom of speech, but add the possibility of being sued if you blatantly made something up, loser pays.
That works OK when the entity being defamed is a corporation that mostly sells to large businesses or governments and the entity doing the defaming is a corporation with real revenue.
If the defamed entity is a consumer products company it gets tougher. Imagine GM or Coca Cola having to decide whether to sue Fox or Newsmax over some BS story with the risk of a counter-boycott from Fox’s true believer contingent hanging out there.
Conversely, imagine the defamer is a subreddit, not a Fox. How does e.g. GM sue that? Witness the recent Gamestop ructions for a harbinger of that future.
Finally, most of the politically-motivated BS out there is about the individual political acts of individual politicians. Who has the resources to sue about that stuff? Or the bandwidth to be launching a half dozen suits per day about the outrages of yesterday’s made up stories. The defamers can always win that escalation because their incremental cost of another fake story are several orders of magnitude less than the cost of any response.
Plus, even Britain, which has a legal regime far friendlier to libel/slander plaintiffs than does the US, has pretty large carve-outs for overtly political speech. Lawsuits just don’t effectively reach that arena.
IMO the deep problem is that it is now profitable to sell crazy; and the crazier the more profitable. We can’t stop the buying of crazy until we stop the selling of crazy and we can’t stop the selling until after we stop the profitable.
They would in a heartbeat. GM and Coca Cola spend billions, with a “B”, on advertizing each year. There is no way they’d tolerate anything which hurt their brand. And when Fox et al lost the case, the judgement would likely include public apologies and “clarifications” from the people at Fox which should help to restore the brand even with the MAGAs.
Yeah, in a heartbeat.
Well it depends. If it’s just people spreading misinformation on such a site, I think no action should be taken. But if it’s say, advertizing, or some kind of hosted content (I don’t think reddit does this, I’m speaking more broadly) then as well as suing the companies concerned, the platform itself can be partially liable (i.e. reddit, facebook, etc).
Politicians do have such resources, especially if it becomes loser pays.
But yeah, I guess my point is that if we make this slightly easier to do, this might get rid of some of the most crazy stuff, or at least push it out of the mainstream. I do not believe that right now suing Fox would be effective and practical.
There is a danger of going too far and starting to impinge on free speech. But the point is, I think there is a danger in doing nothing too, and the US is the prime example. (And, additionally, to anyone worried that fear of being sued will impinge on free speech, I would ask: Does the US have free speech right now? Most people would be hesitant to defame e.g. Disney right now).
Go after their sponsors, and that is already being done.
It’s a messy area in the UK. There is an official regulator for telecommunications, including broadcast (radio/TV) which maintains a code of practice including impartiality and “due accuracy”. There are some radio opinionators and programmes where the presenter’s personality and opinions are part of the point, but there is usually still a fairly strict divide between news reporting and opinion. This doesn’t happen on the main broadcast TV stations, which are expected to balance the opinions represented.
Newspapers and other print media are a different matter: there has been a sort of stand-off over the last few years, since there was an attempt (after a pub;ic enquiry into various scandals taken by many as indicating that previous attempts at self-regulation by the industry had failed) to set up an arrangement where news media could be protected from the more ruinous aspects of the libel law if they could show they had abided by a regulatory system and code of practice overseen by a government regulatory panel. Most refused to take part in that, and set up another voluntary industry-appointed organisation - which not all the press joined, preferring their own complaints and corrections systems.
Arguments continue about whether the worst excesses of the tabloids really are being restrained by their own regulator.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7576/
There’s a certain amount of entertainment to be had from disinformational news outlets, however one defines them.
I often start my day perusing stories on ABC and Fox, which give me two parallel news universes that uncommonly intersect. What one is going ape about rarely gets more than a “meh” from the other.
The problem with the thread title and most of the responses is that the sentiment boils down to the idea that people are simply too stupid to look at all of the available information and discern the truth and/or the best working theory of what the truth is. At its core, it is an attack on the idea of a free press in general.
Just look at the idea that Covid originated in a lab in Wuhan. It was blasted most of last year as a QAnon conspiracy theory and banned on quasi-monopolies like Facebook. Now Biden admits that it is an equal possibility to the bat theory. So Facebook takes his word and now allows comments on it.
Is this where we have gone? Quasi-monopoly companies like Facebook look to government to determine what are the proper subjects of discussion and adjust their policies based on what the government says. And this doesn’t frighten anyone?
Yeah, freedom means that kooks out there will be spouting off nonsense. For my entire life this was always held to be a necessary evil of free speech because who would judge what is a true thing or a false thing or a dangerous thing? Nobody should in a free country. But in the course of my short life, we now have many people who believe in abject censorship of ideas, and many of them, like the origin of Covid, can change when the government changes its narrative.
Very frightening that some posters support this.
“Originated in”? Or “leaked from”? The two are not the same thing.
Not nearly as frightening as what decades of unfettered disinformation has done. There are literally millions of Americans who believe things that are the exact opposite of reality and it is destroying the country. And the people screaming loudest about it at the moment are the ones most vested in disseminating that disinformation. They are slow terrorists, bent on undermining America little by little. Should we not act to stop them?
You might as well complain about the security restrictions airports put us all through. Yes, they’re often invasive and restrictive, but they’re designed to prevent the actions of bad operators from harming others. Facebook and Twitter are merely doing the same.
We’ve seen where we are now. We know that people are that stupid. Even if you ignore the election of an obvious con man and narcissist, you can’t ignore the anti-mask sentiment and the 100000s of people. Or all the people who are rewriting history about the Insurrection. And they think the election was fraudulent.
Requiring people to tell the truth in the news as best they know it is not attacking freedom of the press. That is what the press is supposed to do. It’s not conceptually different from slander and libel, both of which are just types of lies that cause damage. Knowingly pushing false information could be dealt with the same way. (Our courts do still seem to care about facts, as you can tell by them rejecting the false cries of the election being stolen.)
As for the COVID lab claim: there was no actual evidence for that claim. Now there may be evidence. That doesn’t somehow retroactively make the evidence-free claims okay. It was still fake news—a conspiracy theory with direct evidence to the contrary. So places like Facebook who would put up a little informational banner and shut down places that pretended they knew for sure it was from a lab is not a bad thing at all. It’s a good thing that reputable news organizations wouldn’t post it.
Finally, I note that you were a Trump supporter, and Trump had no problem attacking freedom of the press and other parts of the first amendment at every opportunity. They said mean things about him, so he wanted them silenced.
He claimed they were liars, and that this should be reason to be able to shut them up.
Who decides what is disinformation? The Supreme Court says that I can tell people that I stormed the beaches of Normandy and won a Purple Heart and the Congressional Medal of Honor and that is free speech. Under your theory, what is to stop Donald Trump III from buying social media monopolies like Facebook and banning users from saying that the 2020 election was fair and square because of his “fact check”?
Lying and bullshitting have been a part of every campaign since the founding. The solution to that is more speech. When you try to suppress it, people become more intransigent and think that you are hiding “the truth.”
In addition to stifling the freedom of the press and speech, this argument boils down to an attack on representative democracy: People are just to damn stupid to filter their news articles to discern the truth and thus cannot be counted on to responsibly vote.
And it strikes me as a not so coincidental event that these “millions” of people who believe the “exact opposite of reality” just happen to support the opposition candidate to the one you supported. Nobody on your side could be so stupid, right?
That is exactly how repressive governments begin. I’m not suggesting that you want that, but you are buying into it. That is why freedom of speech and the press are so precious and inviolate. We don’t let people in power define “truth” because that is always skewed to their own purposes.
I did check, and it is clear that the supreme court decided that the harm there was not as the prosecution thought. Also, that there were other ways for the government to ensure compliance for a new law designed to counter the false impersonation of past military duty.
In the end, even the guy that “won” the case remained in jail because he was benefiting from the lie by defrauding the government and also a new law was passed to take into account the free speech issue.
Alvarez remained in legal trouble due to allegations that he defrauded the government by falsely receiving health insurance benefits. He was convicted of misappropriation of public funds, grand theft, and insurance fraud in 2009 and sentenced to five years in state prison,[40] and was discharged in March 2012 from Calipatria State Prison.[41]
Revised Stolen Valor Act
In 2012, an effort was initiated to revise the Stolen Valor Act to comply with the Supreme Court’s decision. This resulted in passage and signing of the Stolen Valor Act of 2013. In addition to a wrongful claim of receiving one of the listed military awards, intent to gain some benefit or something of value by fraud was required.[42]
Then to reply to your question, the issue that remains is the one about harm, while the guy stealing valor’s speech was protected, it was because among other things, it was deemed to not be harmful. What Trump would try to do will be speech designed to cause harm, and it was then that Facebook, Tweeter and others banned his sorry ass.
Before Trump, social media platforms didn’t see the need for defined policies or special rules for world leaders. Adam Sharp, Twitter’s founding head of news, government, and elections from 2010 until the end of 2016, told Recode that he often had to convince political figures to use the platform, ideally in a personal or authentic way that would make their constituents feel more connected to them.
Trump would need no such convincing. He already used social media — especially Twitter — the way a lot of people did: to blast out his notions and whims, however unsavory, to whoever was willing to read them. Trump wasn’t dignified, he wasn’t diplomatic, and he saw no need to change his behavior when he ran for and then became president. But the platforms couldn’t have expected what would come next.
“I think there was an expectation that abuse would not be originating from these individuals,” Sharp said. “I can’t really fault anyone, five years ago, for not thinking, ‘Do we need a policy for what happens if the president of the United States promotes an insurrection against the United States?’”
Thank you for your service. 
Biden has “admitted” no such thing.
He stated there was intelligence community disagreement on scenarios and ordered further investigation.
Scientists still heavily favor a jump from animal vector(s).
No, it is the very real observation that most people are too busy and distracted with things that are more important to them in their lives than to spend the time and energy required in looking at all the available information and discerning the truth from it.
We are not your typical voter. Most spend a small fraction of the time analyzing and debating topics than we do.
Quite the opposite, it is a request for debate on how to ensure that the press is doing its job of informing the public without disinformation, while maintaining the freedom of expression. An attack on the press in general would be something along the lines of Trump calling the press the enemy of the people.
I’m curious as to what press you heard that from, as what you say here simply isn’t true. Biden is renewing investigation into what happened, but no one at all, other than nutter conspiracy theorist and the media outlets they consume, suggest that COVID originated in a lab in Wuhan. It is possible, though still doubtful, that the virus was being studied in a lab and got out, but that’s not the same thing as having originated there.
Facebook isn’t the news media, and if you rely on it as a news outlet, then you are only asking yourself to be misinformed.
It’s different from when some kook has his handwritten newsletter, vs when a multibillion dollar company buys up your local news outlets and gives them scripts of dubious information from which they need to read verbatim.
I find it very disappointing that anyone believes that strawman that you have created.
Beyond that, there’s absolutely no reason both can’t be true; it could very well be that the virus evolved after some chain of animal transmissions, and then was isolated and studied by a lab in Wuhan, and then due to some sort of lax security or protocols, was released into the human population.
“Originated” implies that it was engineered by the Chinese, which I don’t think anyone with a drop of scientific education is seriously suggesting.
Don’t forget that the multibillion dollar company is in cahoots with a specific political party, and has specific ideology to push.