65% of Americans support tech companies moderating false information online and 55% support the U.S. government taking these steps. These shares have increased since 2018. Americans are even more supportive of tech companies (71%) and the U.S. government (60%) restricting extremely violent content online.
It’s all fun and games till well intentioned laws get abused by a new administration. Be careful what you wish for. My personal take is that any organization that is even reasonably similar to a news site must conform to fairness in reporting standards much like broadcast TV once had. If you don’t, but an argument could be made that you present as a new site, you just slap a sizeable banner on every page that you are an entertainment site. Drawing distinctions on what is news and what is entertainment would theoretically work better than an outright ban of misleading content.
At the end of the day it won’t matter what is written unless the regulations have actual teeth. “Fines” mean so little given the billion dollar backers could care less and retractions are too little too late. I want these wannabe Nazi “News Infotainment” people to go to jail for their speech that causes harm to people and the nation. Destroying democracy should be painful for the agitators.
There are surely pros and cons, possibly good and possibly bad outcomes with such restrictions, and the whole matter is very complicated.
From my point of view part of the problem is the decline of education and of teaching rational and critical thinking. Science started when we realized and made clear that truth – at least scientific truth – is not about some “authority” (like Aristotle) saying that things are so-and-so, or a majority saying that things are so-and-so. Galilei said this very clearly:
But in the natural sciences, whose conclusions are true and necessary and have nothing to do with human will, one must take care not to place oneself in the defense of error; for here a thousand Demostheneses and a thousand Aristotles would be left in the lurch by every mediocre wit who happened to hit upon the truth for himself.
The problem is that today we’re relegating everything to “experts”, or more generally, we’re expecting someone else to apply critical thinking in our place. Of course this is unavoidable to some degree, but I think the situation could be much improved from this point of view.
If the FCC can regulate content on television, they can regulate content on the internet.
The only reason the FCC doesn’t is the Republican-dominated FCC when Ajit Pai was in charge argued that broadband is an “information service” and not a “telecommunications service” which is like the hair splittingest of splitting fucking hairs. It’s fucking both.
Anyway, once it was classified as “information service” it became something the FCC (claimed it) didn’t have authority to regulate in the same way, allowing them to gut net neutrality.
If they FCC changed the definition back to telecommunications, they wouldn’t be able to regulate foreign websites, but they can easily regulate US sites and regulate entities who want to do business in the US using an internet presence.
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