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this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2024
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Showerthoughts
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Well, that works if the only vector of misinformation is broadcast-based, but it's not. There are far fewer gatekeepers now than there were last century, you don't just have to fact check what comes up the traditional media pipe, also social media claims and claims from marginal sources. Both of which look pretty much identical to traditional media in the forms that most people consume them, which is a big part of the issue.
And, of course, anonymous sourcing and source protection still has a place, it's not as trivial as that.
In any case, there are no silver bullets here. This is the world we live in. We're in mitigation mode now.
Of course not. My point stands though.
The eu is doing a somewhat decent job pushing for platform liability although I would say we need more and harder measures in that case.
Of course all your points apply too so the skill of fact checking needs to be honed. But keeping potential drivers of misinformation accountable is paramount.
Sure, it's a hard line to walk against free speech, though.
I am more concerned about access. Reliable, high quality information is increasingly paywalled, while disinformation is very much not. That is a big problem and, again, one with no easy solutions. If people with the skillset and the disposition need to charge to keep their jobs while meme farmss keep pumping out bad faith narratives funded by hostile actors it's going to be hard to reverse course.
I alsmost wonder if accuntability takes the shape of public funding for information access on outlets meeting certain oversight standards, but that is a very hard sell in a political landscape where some political groups benefit from the current situation.
Yes indeed.
Free speech or freeze peach as I call the populist american approach is no right. It is just a way for people to manipulate the lesser privileged.
The european way of free speech is you are allowed to say whatever you want as long as you harm noone with it. Knowingly spreading lies is the latter. If thats anti free speech to you, then tough luck.
Europe's approach to free speech (in general, there are tons of countries with different takes) is that it's a right along with a bunch of others and it gets limitations like all others. I agree, the US view of rights as places where you do whatever you want and everybody else has to deal with the fallout is fundamentally different to the social democracy approach.
But free speech remains a fundamental right for democracy. If you allow governments to have too much control over resources, private speech or news reporting you end up on the other end of the spectrum, where public resources are spent reinforcing the position of whatever the current government is.
This is and has always been one of the hardest balancing acts of healthy democracies, and it's borderline impossible in a world dominated by for-profit social media and hostile actors deliberately using communication as a weapon.
We have gone far into the fight on principles here.
Yes, free speech
No spreading lies, period.
Could you elaborate on what you mean?
I'm saying that holding a news outlet accountable for accuracy could work in a news landscape where people get their information from a handful of outlets that all reach a broad audience. In a world where a lot of people get small pieces of misinformation from thousands or millions of tiny sources spread across social media it is much harder to keep a centralized control on accuracy for all those communications, even discounting all the issues with free speech and opinion.
Hm, I do agree that many outlets/sources may make things "messier", but I don't think that it would mean that the laws could no longer apply — for example, I think, defamation laws could still apply to anyone.
As I think someone else already pointed out, defamation is not a major part of the issue and it's already in place quite strictly in many places without making a dent on the issue.
And yes, it's absolutely defeated by scale. You can't start a legal process against every single tweet and facebook post (let alone every message in a Whatsapp group you can't even see in the first place). As with paywalls, the aggregate effect ends up being that large outlets are held to a high standard while misinformation spread through social media is not just cheaper to make but less accountable.
Imo, theoretically one could, but I think that it would be impractical, or at least prohibitively expensive.
Same thing. You'll run out of court bandwidth even before you run out of money, and you will definitely run out of money.
And you literally can't in many cases when you're dealing with messages being sent internationally.
"the issue" being misinformation and disinformation that's not defamation?
Sure. Defamation is a very specific case of improper communication.
But even defamation is hard to control in a world of distributed social media communication.
I agree. Though, anecdotally, I'm not exactly fond of how some news outlets that I've come across use such types of sources — they use some adulterated quote snipped buried within their article; I think it would be better if they, for example, post explicitly the entire unadulterated (within good reason) transcript of the anonymous source with all relevant metadata cited along with it, and then cite that in whatever article.
Yeah, it's a problematic tool, for sure. In politics in particular it can be used to present interested or partisan information as factual or to manufacture a story. Happens all the time.
That's why loopholes are loopholes and controlling misinformation is so hard. Perfectly legitimate tools can be used maliciously or unethically and there are very valuable babies in that bathwater that shouldn't be sacrificed in pursuit of easy solutions.