this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2024
483 points (99.2% liked)
The Onion
6471 readers
1017 users here now
The Onion
A place to share and discuss stories from The Onion, Clickhole, and other satire.
Great Satire Writing:
- The Onion
- Clickhole
- McSweeney's
- Reductress
- The Chaser
- The Hard Times
- The Needling
- Tattletale Times
- The Beaverton
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Misinformation laws can quickly get 1984-ish. In the US both political parties have different ideas on what's true and what's misinformation, I don't really like the idea of criminalizing "misinformation" when the accepted narrative will change every 4-8 years.
Edit: Surprisingly, this is now one of my most downvoted comments ever on Lemmy. Do you guys really want the government deciding what you can or can't say online?
Yeah. To me the misinformation conversation just sounds like”why are the poors talking to each other instead of listening to US?”
If we had a misinformation law in 2001, would it have applied to the news outlets or gov officials who were lying about the Iraq war?
There is A real problem in how we sort out second hand evidence, it’s just that this problem didn’t magically start when social media became a thing and it won’t be fixed by returning authority to those same old institutions who were lying to us in the past.
"can get" implies there's examples of like misinfo laws becoming orwellian. I cannot find such examples. Laws that penalize people for knowingly lying for profit, clout, etc tend to curb bombastic discourse. These standards are common in defamation suits. Extending them to more media makes sense.
What's always orwellian is like anti terrorism laws where laws intended to curb oppositional rhetoric or groups become applied on large swaths of people.
The actual laws they prosecuted Assange for, for instance were anti espionage laws if I recall.
Obvious examples are countries like Russia, China, North Korea, etc. Russia specifically passed laws banning misinformation in 2020, and later fined google millions of dollars over it.
Sure, and this one probably wasn't great but also the article shows why there's of course a valuable line