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Comment by kiba | Hacker News Reader

As opposed to letting transparently false information trick people who should know better?

You're right, we should be leery about government regulations, but false information is a problem.

China often claims their censorship of news is about reducing the spread of "false" information. Who decides what is "false"? If we have to have someone doing that, I'd argue the one group that must be immediately disqualified from that position is the government, given that they have a known and totally on-purpose information imbalance with the public about tons of subjects they consider sensitive or "classified", and that a large amount of media reporting is about the government and wants to touch on these subjects.

Censorship and policies for countering fake news are not the same thing in China. The former is aimed at maintaining social stability and the latter is simply identifying the fake news and informing the public of the real situation.

For censorship it is the government that decides what to censor. But for the fake news, it is mainly the fact self-organized checking groups and the news media's job, and the government is not directly involved. One popular fact checking group has a name that literally translates into "rumor shredder": http://www.guokr.com/group/40/

Of course those that are found to be guilty of spreading false information are punishable by law, which is handled in the court and enforced by the police. But that's an entirely different process with very different parties involved as compared to censorship.

In short, censorship works at the government level and is enforced by the ISPs directly, whereas stopping fake news works at the level of self-organized groups and the case goes through the court system.

So, "censorship" is totally something that existed before the ability of mankind to automate enforcement: the police (the enforcement arm of the government) coming to your house to shut down the printing press you set up to distribute your underground newspaper full of "illegal" information is generally considered "censorship", and if for some reason you insist on a definition that doesn't include that, I hope we can both agree that 1) China does that (whatever you prefer to call it) and 2) we don't like that they do that.

Yes and yes for you. Yes and no for me.

Only the ones are subjected to the "censorship" may not like it. I am pretty sure what's going on in Chinese is also happening with CIA, FBI, MI6, etc. Ordinary people won't say that they do not like them, because it does not concern their interests and whatever operations that do can be justified as national security measures or national interest. But if you, however, do not like whatever CIA, etc are doing, then of course you wouldn't like what China is doing either.

That's why there's separation of power in democracies. Not the government (i.e. the executive branch), but the courts are in charge of deciding what's "false"

The courts of the judicial branch are generally supposed to (I realize this is blurry) interpret the law put together by the legislative branch, not define it. Let's look at the DMCA for a second, which makes certain actions users can perform to devices they own illegal: the courts could claim the law is inconsistent with some "higher law" (such as the Constitution), but it is absolutely Congress which defined what is and is not "legal". (Though, to make that specific matter even more complex, while they had the say in what finally happened, the executive branch there had tons of leverage as the DMCA is essentially mandated to exist in a form similar to the one it does by a treaty signed by the President, so it would have been complex to say "nope".)

You can always move the goalposts for "false". The major media outlets engage in misleading stuff like that all the time.

Did you see NBC's post-debate fact check?

Trump said Clinton “acid washed” her private email server. She didn’t. She used an app called Bleachbit, not a corrosive chemical.

...

http://heavy.com/news/2016/10/nbc-fact-check-trump-clinton-a...

(I don't know how good this site is, it was just the first Google result).

The end result (as well as this is meant), is that news and media organizations now effectively need a government stamp of approval.

You can see where that could go wrong. Funny it should happen in Germany of all places...

Even worse, citizens are incentivized to disregard critical thinking. Oh, this hasn't been banned...it must be true.

If only Germany would have the same allergic reaction to power consolidation that it has to anything resembling Nazis.

Technically, the people who believe false information and aren't critical are the problem, but I guess there's not a whole lot we can do about that, other than prevent the incentives that currently exist for fake news (ad profit)?

Yeah: I'd even argue that banning the sale of advertising space "by the click" or even "by the view" (as opposed to "by the action": where someone has to actually purchase the product being advertised before the website gets paid, which is a much better model anyway) would be a safer thing to do to civilization (and would have tons of other really nice effects; we'd probably finally get rid of those articles which are broken into 20 pages, one sentence a page, in the hope of getting more "clicks") than having state-sponsored censorship.

I mean: isn't it extremely interesting that we are now walking backwards to this point starting with "due to a lack of this kind of censorship, we allowed a very conservative person to get into office"; it is almost like this is being taken as an "opportunity" to get liberal people who otherwise would balk at this idea to get on board because now it is supposedly on their side and is couched in terms they agree with. I wonder if there are people who noticed this whole thing as their opening to finally broach the subject with Western civilization :/.

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