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Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts

blog.mass.gov

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Re: Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts

#91

Post by learc83 »

wilsonnb wrote: post #68
zenhack wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The standard answer under US law is the jury; the concern you raise is deeply embedded in our legal system.

I don't think that juries decide what's true and what's not. They decide whether the evidence presented to them is sufficient to show that an event or events happened. My understanding is that even in defamation suits they are mostly trying to prove that person A said thing X about person C and then prove that person C was harmed because of it. However, I am honestly not sure if it's just American first amendment ind…

Truth is a defense in defamation cases. If that defense is presented, then a jury most certainly will attempt to determine if the defamatory statement is true.

And in almost any case, the jury is tasked with determining the credibility of witnesses.

Re: Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts

#92

Post by jacquesm »

deadmetheny wrote: post #26
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I very very rarely hear a fact touted by the left OR right that is just outright incorrect. The right absolutely makes up stories: https://www.snopes.com/tag/breitbart/ https://www.snopes.com/tag/fox-news/ Lots and lots of false statements here.

Snopes isn't made up of experts and isn't an unbiased source. It mystifies me that so many people treat it as reliable, let alone infallible. (sorry for pointing this out, but downvoting me doesn't change that it's true)

That's about as useful as saying that Wikipedia may contain nonsense and therefore you shouldn't believe anything in Wikipedia. If you have examples of things on Snopes that are wrong then please supply them.

Re: Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts

#93

Post by icebraining »

wilsonnb wrote: post #77
icebraining wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the same kind of progress; they're mostly playing catch up.

Well, yes, they have to play catch up now because we were/are ahead of them. The question is whether or not they will always be playing catch up, and whether or not that's directly related to the personal freedom of their citizens.

Yes, my point is that we still don't know, so it's early to use them as evidence one way or the other. And with a lack of evidence, Chesterton's Fence implies we shouldn't touch it.

Re: Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts

#95

Post by refurb »

wilsonnb wrote: post #18
rsync wrote: post #5

"Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts" Thankfully, we've learned a few things since then and liberal (classic definition, not American definition), democratic minded people know how dangerous government defined truth (no matter how simple or well accepted) is. There is a cost to this, of course - the citizenry is required to have a level of sophistication and erudition and they will be forced…

It's not productive to tell those who disagree with you to grow up. There are serious consequences from having unlimited freedom of speech and you are not encouraging serious discussion about solutions to them by belittling people. I think it's also worth considering the effect that the internet has on the flow of information in society. Our current situation is not the same as it is when the first amendment was writ…

This sounds strangely like the arguments for reinterpreting the 2nd amendment.

Re: Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts

#96

Post by derefr »

icebraining wrote: post #88
derefr wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whistleblowing Keep in mind, I’m not suggesting that the source would need to be named ; I’m only suggesting that the data from the source would need to be able to be independently recollected from the same source. In the example of a whistleblower, that would mean that the journalist would need to ensure that there was some secure anonymous route by which other journalists could get in contact with the same whistl…

Basically, your sources would need to be “made available” in the same way witnesses are made available during a trial: there to be interrogated by interested parties who want to dispute their story, even if also safe from harm (by e.g. witness protection.) Which is quite unrealistic unless you're talking about blowing a story about the local bakery or something like that. If any journalist can access the witness, the…

You're being pretty uncharitable in assuming that there would need to be exactly one protection mechanism and that every source would necessarily have that same protection applied to it.

There are a spectrum of solutions to creating anonymity. If your source is just a faceless worker who happened to overhear something about their boss, then all they need from you is a burner phone, an email address on a public server, and GPG keys—all of which you can give out the public halves of.

If your source is Edward Snowden, and his information is about the state, then I would suggest that there's really no way to do things other than full-on "witness protection" in the sense Snowden achieved: the state is going to figure out who leaked the information, so even without giving other journalists access to your source, anonymity for them (where they currently live) is no longer possible. You may as well fly them to Russia; at which point they're safe enough that you can just give them the a public email address, tell them to access it from an Internet cafe over Tor, and now they've once again got a contact point that anyone else could interact with them through without "blowing their cover." So why not give it out?

Re: Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts

#97

Post by drzaiusapelord »

patrickg_zill wrote: post #70
ixtli wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a concerted effort to discredit expert opinion which the shorter term goal of allowing people to equate their own laymen's understanding with that of someone versed in a subject.

Nate Silver = election expert Me = not an expert on elections Yet, at almost every turn along the path of the 2016 election, I was far more accurate than Nate Silver. Is Nate Silver's expert opinion still more valuable than mine? Is expert opinion valuable even if it is right no more often than coin flipping?

> I was far more accurate than Nate Silver.

You got lucky. If you can consistently beat his methodology then you'd be just as famous and wealthy and well regarded as he is instead of an internet nobody.

This is like saying "college is for the birds, I just plan to win the lottery."

>Is Nate Silver's expert opinion still more valuable than mine?

Absolutely. Missing the boat on what turned out to be something of a freak-show election where 77,000 votes out of than 136 million ballots cast is tough for anyone to get right. And most of who, did so by dumb luck, not some wonderful new methodology that is useful against past election data or current election data. The very same people beating their chests over Trump's win predicted Moore would win Alabama or Saccone would beat Lamb.

In other words its just dumb partisanship, not some new polling or statistical technique at work here. Patting yourself on the back because you 'called it' for Trump is a meaningless statement unless you have the math to prove your methods are better than Nate Silvers.

Re: Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts

#98

Post by wilsonnb »

refurb wrote: post #95
wilsonnb wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not productive to tell those who disagree with you to grow up. There are serious consequences from having unlimited freedom of speech and you are not encouraging serious discussion about solutions to them by belittling people. I think it's also worth considering the effect that the internet has on the flow of information in society. Our current situation is not the same as it is when the first amendment was writ…

This sounds strangely like the arguments for reinterpreting the 2nd amendment.

I would gladly make this exact argument for the second amendment. I don't see anything wrong with updating the Constitution as our society changes.

Re: Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts

#100

Post by thaumaturgy »

rsync wrote: post #5

"Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts" Thankfully, we've learned a few things since then and liberal (classic definition, not American definition), democratic minded people know how dangerous government defined truth (no matter how simple or well accepted) is. There is a cost to this, of course - the citizenry is required to have a level of sophistication and erudition and they will be forced…

> The citizenry is required to have a level of sophistication and erudition and they will be forced to make nuanced and complicated judgements about the state of their world.

This is a fantasy in good company with, "free markets will always sort everything out fairly", "we don't need governments or regulations, just property rights", "unrestricted gun ownership will make everyone safer", and "the solution to clickbait is for people to just start reading the articles."

It depends on everyone suddenly becoming some kind of imagined ideal, just so that the world doesn't have to be so fuzzy and messy and can be reduced to simplistic mantras that any child can memorize.

> It may help to read about twentieth century dictatorships and the history of modern, repressive regimes in general.

It may also help to realize that the early 21st century has some issues that the early 20th century didn't. The power of business interests has now risen to compete on an equal footing with the largest governments, and in many cases is subverting or corrupting it. With so many people now being plugged in to some form of media or another, and so much of that media being controlled by a small number of powerful oligopolies, people are being influenced in ways that Hearst never could've imagined.

I'm ambivalent about legislating media, but there are a few incontrovertible facts IMO: this is a new problem for society, it's a serious problem, and people aren't going to magically become resilient to it overnight.

I think the people who are aghast at Trump sitting in the White House have already got some sense of the scope of this problem. For the people who are happy to see him there, I'd point out that a lot of leftists seriously floated the idea of Oprah running for president, and that only stopped because she wasn't interested. Imagine the amount of political influence she would have had through the media she controls, though.

As is so often the case, probably all that's needed to get right-leaning people on board with tightening regulations on media is for the left to find their Trump.

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