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Comment by mikeq101101 | Hacker News Reader

Who decides what is a "proven source of disinformation"?

The media that are currently paraded as trustworthy were all in on things like "babies out of incubators", "weapons of mass destruction", Libya, etc. And everyone who tried to go against them was smeared as conspiracy theorist.

I can not trust the media that was integral in lying about and manufacturing consent for endless wars, when they have not learned from their mistakes and are still beating their drums.

Giving the elites power to decide what is a "proven source of disinformation" sounds like a really bad idea.

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> Who decides what is a "proven source of disinformation"?

That question doesn't get nearly enough attention among those decrying the rise of fake news. Even the NYT occasionally gets it wrong. Does that make them a "proven source of disinformation"?

The answer is not to throw your hands in the air and concede to factual relativism. But the first step to solving this problem is to recognize that it is a very, very difficult problem.

It is not a difficult problem, ban the bots from St. Petersburg, not the god damn NYT.

What you are effectively saying is that the answer to "who decides" is you. I can see why you would think that is a satisfactory answer, but can you see how a reasonable person might disagree?

If reasonable people are disagreeing, then they have reasons to disagree. If reasons can drive a discussion, they can decide issues like this. So your question is misleading. It's not "who decides", but "what decides", and how to we ensure the "what" remains reasons that reasonable people would support.

Otherwise, you're just asking how people make decisions. "Who decided murder should be illegal" is just a poor (rather conspiratorial) way to ask what reasons are used to argue that it should be illegal and how we determined that those reasons were sufficient.

Presumably, in a democracy, the answer to "who determines what the government does" is "the people."

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