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Comment by jay_kyburz | Hacker News Reader

I consider myself pretty progressive, but I find the idea of forcing companies to "open up their networks" distasteful and problematic. I just doesn't seem piratical.

I've said it a few times before, I don't think the problem is the carriers, its that there are no penalties for telling a lie on the internet.

This is where we should start to fix this problem.

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Eventually you'll run into the problem of defining a lie. How about a half-truth? Lying by omission?

The laws in most western countries allow for consequences in cases of slander and libel or where a person directly seeks to sow hatred and division against minorites for instance, defined as hate speech. Even that last part is somewhat controversial in regards to free speech, as some people think there should be no limits on speech at all.

I think the solution (or at least part of a solution) is to mandate open standards and transparency, especially when it touches politics. Provide federated social network standards that interoperate, instead of the walled gardens we have now.

> there are no penalties for telling a lie on the internet.

Some unrelated points on this:

People will believe you less if they find evidence against your lie.

This problem is a recent one that came about when the gullible masses started arriving to the internet in the 2000s.

I can concieve of no structured way of penalizing liars because I don't see any way of making a truth determining institution that would not be immediately corrupted.

For Americans, First Amendment protects telling lies (as long as there is no other crime such as fraud), so penalties for lying on the internet likely wouldn't stand up in court.

Well then, the problem is baked right into the first amendment. (But aren't most lies a kind of fraud?)

No, not every lie is fraud and everyone lies from time to time. What problem do you think this would solve? Frankly, I think it would have catastrophic repercussions for any form of communication. Try to complete a day with complete honesty. Wouldn't net you that many friends. Perhaps a few would think you are refreshingly funny. Probably people that are a bit angry with current aspirations to restrict content.

I see at least a few problems with penalizing lies:

1. Who is going to determine whether a given statement is a lie or not?

2. What about sarcasm and works of fiction? (And who (and how) determines whether a given post was intended to be sarcastic or not?)

3. What about a context? For instance, exactly the same wording of a message might carry a different meaning depending on the content of other posts in a thread. While I believe that this is somehow clear and obvious, what is not obvious is what makes a full context - is it just direct parent post, or whole thread or maybe even a larger part of a website? What if selection of context makes a difference (for example if I just use parent post as a context, the statement appears to be a lie, if I judge by the whole thread it possibly appears to be sarcastic). Now, who (and how) decides which context should be applied for analysis?

4. Transnational problems - which laws apply and how would you enforce it?

5. What problems would it actually fix? Lets say that from now on, I am not allowed to post on hackernews that Barack Obama visited my parents (he did not, it's a lie) - what problem it solves that I am not allowed to post that? (edit: formatting)

For 1 2 and 3 we rely on the courts. It's already their job to decide when somebody has broken the law or not. The courts need to decide if a reasonable person could tell if some writing is sarcasm or fiction, and if it was written to intentional mislead, then its a crime. 4 is just a hard problem we need to work through.

5. The problem that needs fixing is that people don't trust anything they read any more. Nobody knows what to believe and can't make a good judgement call about what is a trustworthy news source. This results in a polarised, ignorant society.

If you post online that Trump likes your mums cooking, nobody is going to take you to court because the damages done is almost nothing. If you post online that Trump wants to evict all Chinese nationals from the country, well that's a lie that could cause some real strife, and I would be happy if that was just not written on the internet.

Relying on courts seems to suffer one problem: given the scale and amount of posts I doubt that any judical system is capable to process that amount of cases.

Secondly, as it was already pointed in this thread, there are other ways to manipulate - for example by omitting some facts or simply rephrasing them.

To give you an extreme but real life example, recently in Poland there was news about Robert Biedron, left wing politician who rescued a two year old boy and his father from a burning car, then according to other media he just allowed them to wait in his car before police arrived (and I can't honestly tell which version is true - this kind of supports your point), but there was also a headline that translates to "Car crashed and burning with a 2 year old child on board. Robert Biedron involved". While this obviously gives a completely inverse impression on the viewer, technically this is not a lie - all the information in that headline is true and 100% correct. Penalizing lying on the internet will not stop manipulation. Maybe just make it a little bit harder forcing the manipulator to be a bit more creative

You don't need to lie to abuse a monopoly, the problem is the monopoly itself.

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