Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts

http://blog.mass.gov/masslawlib/legal-history/the-law-against-lying-and-false-news-in-colonial-massachusetts/

by jimschley • 8 years ago

173 191 8 years ago

blog.mass.gov

jfoutz• 8 years ago

I'm really happy to have my freedom of speech. I don't think i would do well under the classic Puritan model.

I do sometimes wonder if there's room for a special class of formal speech for journalism. Grant rights perhaps formalizing protecting a source. But also require some responsibilities. Not sure what the standard should be, but we do the same thing for lawyers and doctors.

Also "pernicious to the publick weal" is an amusing phrase.

jadedhacker5• 8 years ago

For what its worth, we did do this though it is in part a sort of detente between prosecutors and journalists.

This wall has been eroded, with some of the most striking erosion happening around the threatened prosecution of James Risen for refusing to disclose a source.

https://theintercept.com/2018/01/03/my-life-as-a-new-york-ti...

ralusek2• 8 years ago

This whole "fake news" thing is absolutely ridiculous. What's interesting to me is that I very very rarely hear a fact touted by the left OR right that is just outright incorrect. The problem is much less to do with facts, and much more to do with implications or conclusions, which many news sources dish out handily.

Zak• 8 years ago

The original meaning was literally something that looks like a news report, but reports as fact something that didn't actually happen and isn't obviously satire. As an example, "Pope Francis endorses Donald Trump".

That was, in fact a fake news story. The fact it asserted had no basis in reality.

guelo• 8 years ago

That's weird, I constantly see friends spreading outright incorrect, political trolling from clickbait factories like "Daily World Upate" or "America’s Last Line of Defense".

KC8ZKF2• 8 years ago

"Fake news" has become a cure for cognitive dissonance, but it started out as "pizzagate" and its ilk. That certainly was fake, somewhat effective, and toxic. It's still around. Check out qanon, spirtcooking, etc.

dmix• 8 years ago

but it started out as "pizzagate" and its ilk.

Funny seeing such a local and current political tribe-based perspective in a discussion on the history of fake news.

As if they just happened to be witness to the spawning of some new phenomenon which also happens to be caused by their pet political opponents. Meanwhile in reality it's really been one of the oldest products of human-fallible mass media consumption (see: low investment content targeting emotion driven responses) used by every political ideology who happens to have influence over particular media sources.

That may have been your introduction, of a popular/easy punching-bag demographic pushing their own politically convenient narrative. But this particular story hardly extends beyond a niche of extremists (or at most a sizeable group of hopelessly low-education voters) on Reddit/Twitter. Notably these days including a large percentage of trolls who know better but will happily push it because they enjoy getting reactions.

I find it interesting to see how this type of misrepresentation and FUD is spawned by otherwise smart people. Beyond simply being young and naive by thinking everything you recently discovered is a new phenomenon. And ultimately I believe it has to do with their exposure to media within their small bubble of content sources, followed by a mass extrapolation to the wider public who identify with their adversarial political party. So they legitimately think it's an important problem and feature of x group, instead of almost every group a) by dumb subset after certain scale or b) the ideas of an entirely fringe group. But usually it's just a vocal minority of a niche forum gets applied to the wider public.

If outrage and reactionary politics was scaled to the actual influence and power of the groups they see as a threat the world would be a far more boring and stable place. But that doesn't sell Buzzfeed pageviews, or any newspaper commercially incentivized exaggerated narratives, nor does it translate well to 2-3 sentence long comments on social media sites.

Pandering, oversimplification, and snarky soundbites is what sells on reddit. It's the perfect platform for overblown FUD to spread. Which is iornic given how Redditors love to attack TV shows, targeting the emotions of the lowest common denominators, for doing the same.

EGreg• 8 years ago

Fake news used to refer to “Hillary Clinton has a body double” or stuff you’d find in the Enquirer.

And now the term has been hijacked to mean any new you disagree with.

protomyth2• 8 years ago

I was quite fond of the Weekly World News, particularly their article on how there was a gate to Hell in North Dakota and the Governor sending a tactical team to try to kill the devil.

gowld3• 8 years ago

The Enquirer is real (gossip/trash) news, at least at the level of carefully worded exaggerated rumor that some real person claimed to have observed.

Weekly World News is fictional satire about aliens.

trgv• 8 years ago

I don't think it was ridiculous to begin with (neither was "terrorism") but it's ridiculous now.

I would define "fake news" as news published by people who know what they're publishing is false. My feeling is that either there were more of those kinds of articles floating around this past election or they were more visible.

You might just call it clickbait, but "fake news" didn't seem like an inapt descriptor until it started being applied to everything someone disagrees with.

karmelapple• 8 years ago

Would you also consider it news the publisher knows mislead, even if there’s a grain of truth?

craftyguy• 8 years ago

I very very rarely hear a fact touted by the left OR right that is just outright incorrect

Go look at donald trump's twitter feed. It's full of outright incorrect statements being presented as fact.

ralusek2• 8 years ago

Donald Trump is not a news source, he's a moron.

jccalhoun3• 8 years ago

There are certainly "facts" that I have heard people say or spread online that were clearly false like millions of illegals voted in the last election (when in reality one article claimed that and had lots of rebuttals and now has a disclaimer at the top of the article) https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/illegal-immigrants-2008-el...

or that Hillary Clinton only won 57 counties in the 2016 election https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-won-3084-of-3141-cou...

However, the fact stands that there are also a lot more cases of wildly different interpretations of the same fact. We can look at poverty rates or crime rates and draw very different conclusions about the causes or solutions to those problems based on the same information.

ixtli7• 8 years ago

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.

patrickg_zill• 8 years ago

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?

avs7333• 8 years ago

Hence the sovereign citizen movement...

JoshCole• 8 years ago

Bombs hit Syria vs bombs intercepted. Gassing by Syria vs false flag by Britain. Clearly, we do run into situations where multiple sets of facts are put forward. So fake news is not a ridiculous thing that never happens. Suggesting that it is because not all news is intentionally fake is like saying there is no such thing as war because we don't often see people killing each other.

Moving away from extreme cases, things are still wrong enough to cause trouble. False information is inherently surprising when presented as true, because it isn't expected. It follows that false information lends itself better to clickbait titles. This in turn leads to false information having better click through and sharing metrics. Sharing metrics and engagement metrics are used to power recommendation systems. So it follows that recommendation systems are biased toward recommending false information. Compounding the issue, content producers know this. They optimize their content for an environment which promotes false information, which biases content in a way that generates the sort of speculative conclusions you mention. As a natural consequence of the flawed environment, this flawed content is then seen by a greater number of people.

That out news system isn't as good as would like is just true. I still remember the TED talk when I found out about how much better the world was doing by most metrics. All those educated and rich people who could afford to attend a TED talk and yet the majority had no idea as to the true state of the world. If the news wasn't biased such that it presents a false narrative, then why such glaring ignorance among the educated?

BookmarkSaver• 8 years ago

There is an entire world of straight-up fabricated "journalism" disguised as reputable reporting which gets immense circulation on social media networks. It is very easy to not experience this sort of thing, using fairly basic but overall uncommon steps. For instance, I don't use Twitter and I've filtered all my random acquaintances (e.g. random people I knew in high school) from my FB feed years ago. But there are patently false links being passed around at an enormous rate on these sites, and people that don't personally invest themselves into that sort of social media, or simply don't discriminate between who they see stuff from, get exposed to it a lot.

soundwave106• 8 years ago

The definition of "fake news" when I first heard the term more or less dealt with sites parroting outright falsehoods. It didn't necessarily have to be explicitly political. False gossip sites, outrage-inducing headlines to the wild side of the tabloids, fake business news (http://fortune.com/2017/05/30/fake-news-sites-local-business...), troll-ish article sites (ala the National Report), homeopathy woo (ala Natural News), and other conspiracy oriented venues (eg GlobalResearch, Infowars) were among the many types of "fake news" out there.

The political angle it has taken is unfortunate -- due to the prominence of "fake news" in the last US election; the net effect has been a devolution of the word into a snarl word for "I don't like your particular political point of view". IMHO what you are describing -- a news organization has a bias or opinion (strong or not), but still tries to maintain some degree of connection with factual data -- is not fake news.

rsync• 8 years ago

"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 to make nuanced and complicated judgements about the state of their world.

If you find that too high a bar to cross, a "ministry of truth" may sound attractive. Please grow up and resist that urge. It may help to read about twentieth century dictatorships and the history of modern, repressive regimes in general.

jadedhacker5• 8 years ago

Unfortunately, there are voices in the foreign policy establishment that are openly advocating for a "ministry of truth" https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/atlantic-council-explains...

kristianc4• 8 years ago

Caitlyn Johnstone is a 9/11 truther, and not representative of any 'foreign policy establishment', imagined or otherwise.

lifeisstillgood2• 8 years ago

i think something akin to libel laws might be interesting - if you knowingly publish untruths about me that's libel - about society in general that's ... fake news and you can be civility liable?

wilsonnb13• 8 years ago

The problem always ends up being "who decides what is not true?".

Many people think that such a thing is not possible, or that the giving the Government such a power would be too much.

I personally think I could be persuaded to give such a power to the judiciary branch. I'd have to think about it a lot more before coming to a final decision, though.

avs7333• 8 years ago

That's assuming that economic sanction or a retraction published on page C19 are effective resolutions.

If you are going to address this, it seems to me to almost require a pre-emptive rather than a reactive approach.

ropeadopepope3• 8 years ago

Tell me the difference between stupid and illegal and I'll have my wife's brother arrested.

Seriously though, libel and slander cases in the US are ridiculously hard to prove because you have to prove intent.

da_chicken3• 8 years ago

Citizenry will do what they always have: accept the narrative that benefits them the most or that they've been indoctrinated to accept without questioning. The Internet isn't going to magically change human nature.

That doesn't mean that we need a Ministry of Truth a la Brazil or 1984, but this isn't an either-or issue. The Fairness Doctrine[0] was a fairly nice compromise. We have long required advertisers to be truthful, even using the extremely broad standard of "truth" set by the FTC. Why shouldn't news organizations be held to a similar ethical or moral standard? Does it benefit society if the only opinions broadcast as fact are filtered by corporate interests? That may be better than being filtered by government interests, but it's still not in the best interests of the public, is it?

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

testvox2• 8 years ago

How would you apply the fairness doctrine to the web though. Will I have to host opposing viewpoints on my blog or face fines? The fairness doctrine made sense back when your ability to broadcast your opinions was limited by the shared medium of the radio spectrum. But now that anyone with any viewpoint can broadcast to everyone via the Internet the fairness doctrine doesn't make sense.

joe_the_user• 8 years ago

"Why shouldn't news organizations be held to a similar ethical or moral standard?" [as advertisers or as broadcasters, apparently]

Among other problems, the definition of "news organization" is completely fluid in this Internet era. What organization in particular gets a truth or balance mandate? Some? All? Which ever ones the censors consider most credible?

"Does it benefit society if the only opinions broadcast as fact are filtered by corporate interests?"

Not sure how you got here. Proposing news organizations obey some "truth" or "balance" conditions essentially is mandating state filtering.

The Internet, so far, has allowed a wider dissemination of ideas than ever before. Are you saying that organizations, on the net, large and small, broadcasting their views, is "corporate filtered news?" Seems like you're stretching things to say the least.

rayiner3• 8 years ago

Why shouldn't news organizations be held to a similar ethical or moral standard?

At best it gives an imprimatur of credibility to unreliable information. (E.g. as with the food pyramid, doctors' recommendations regarding salt and eggs, etc.)

paulddraper2• 8 years ago

Citizenry will do what they always have: accept the narrative ...that they've been indoctrinated to accept without questioning.

And as the most established institution in society, that's precisely why the government should not indoctrinate narratives, directly or indirectly.

The right solution to bad free speech is more speech, not less.

thankthunk2• 8 years ago

that they've been indoctrinated to accept without questioning.

Which is made easier when governments define and outlaw "fake" news. What separated us from totalitarian governments in the 20th century was we protected speech while hitler/stalin/mao/etc outlawed "fake news".

Do you really want Trump or Obama or Hillary or George Bush to have the power to limit speech? Do you really want either the republican or democratic party to define and outlaw "fake news"? Do you want corporate interests to ban "fake news"? Oil companies bribing politicians to label climate change as fake news? Drug companies bribing politicians to label the drug epidemic as fake news? I certainly don't.

acchow• 8 years ago

Citizenry will do what they always have: accept the narrative that benefits them the most or that they've been indoctrinated to accept without questioning.

All human history of progress goes against this claim.

We abolished slavery a few centuries ago.

Marijuana is being legalized in various countries and states.

etc.

The Internet isn't going to magically change human nature.

On the contrary, civilization has always challenged "what is acceptable/right/wrong/etc". The internet is allowing us to accelerate this process with easier communication between and congregation of dissidents.

michaelmrose2• 8 years ago

The fairness doctrine makes little sense in the context of the internet. My random comment/post on reddit may in the course of a paragraph contain 5 different assumptions that may be orthogonal to the actual main point.

It will not contain therein space for alternative thoughts on the main point let alone space for any alternatives for any unexamined assumptions.

Truth is multidimensional and fairness impossible to determine to everyone's satisfaction. For example 2 people discussing the best way to travel around the world are unlikely to find agreement with someone who believes the earth is flat and impossible to fly around and 2 different types of dating artifacts are equally meaningless to someone who believes the earth is 6000 years old.

Alternative viewpoints can find themselves a home in the comment section or if undesirable there on your own home on the web.

Wherein the web isn't censored in a heavy handed fashion we have the most reasonable answer to the fairness doctrine. Everyone can be heard but not everyone will find an audience that desires to listen.

jernfrost3• 8 years ago

In Norway the media has an ethics organization they vuluntarily join, which may make rulings on whether a news organization has abused their power or not. It doesn’t carry any actual punishment to my knowledge but it is a public embarrasment so media try to respect its rulings.

sametmax• 8 years ago

We have long required advertisers to be truthful,

That didn't work at all. It just made advertisers sneakier. They still lie as much as they can, and when they can't, use tricks to focus peoples attention elsewhere, or move the ad on a medium where they can lie.

wilsonnb13• 8 years ago

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 written. I'm not saying we should get rid of it and institute a Ministry of Truth, but we shouldn't assume that the people who wrote it were infallible and any differences between today's society and society 300 years ago don't matter.

kristianc4• 8 years ago

Since the first amendment we've had 200+ years of nearly untrammeled progress. Before that, we in Europe had absolute monarchy and the divine right of Kings.

Now sure, they might have been wrong, and they're weren't infallible, but if you're seeking to overturn that, you probably need something more compelling than 'the internet has increased the flow of information'. It was the increased flow of information with the printing press that brought about the Enlightenment in the first place.

refurb• 8 years ago

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

derefr4• 8 years ago

It's intriguing that this is exactly the reverse of the argument (complete with "we've learned a few things since then") that people make when discussing ICOs.

The requirements for IPOs are important, they argue. Investor accreditation is important to prevent the naive masses from wasting their live-savings on snake-oil, they argue. "Please grow up and resist the urge" for unregulated securities, they argue.

I think both arguments generalize, which makes the contrast interesting. Is the SEC, in its role in preventing equity sales to unaccredited investors, a "ministry of truth", censoring some companies from speaking to people who would want to transact with them?

I would argue they're not, because they're not actually deciding who gets to sell equity. Anyone can sell equity—provided that party also discloses a whole bunch of information about itself. If it refuses to do that, then that party is restricted to only sell equity to people who are rich enough to not be risking much in an individual investment.

I think this could be a workable model for regulating the news media (including Joe random blogger.) If you're publishing to the world, then you have to disclose all the research that went into your piece. If you're unwilling to do that, then the state could have a right to in turn restrict where you can publish.

icebraining6• 8 years ago

I think this could be a workable model for regulating the news media: you can publish whatever you like, as long as you disclose your entire fact-gathering process (i.e. "cite your sources") in a way where another journalist could do the same research and reach the same conclusions about what happened (i.e. "replicate your study".)

Whelp, there goes whistleblowing. Or generally any source that prefers not to be named. I think your proposal destroys some of the most important journalism.

Also, conclusions in journalism are not mathematical equations; they don't derive linearly from the facts. Who gets to decide whether that particular conclusion is or not supported by the facts?

avs7333• 8 years ago

I think both arguments generalize,

I cringe at my own pedantry here but I think it's important to the larger conversation.

All arguments generalize. That isn't just the point of the argument, it is what an argument is - a synthesis and generalization of evidence. That an argument generalizes isn't the problem, how and to what extent the argument does and the implications and chain of evidence for the generalizations is what matters.

testvox2• 8 years ago

I think the fact that people are allowed to invest in gold and bitcoin and lottery tickets shows that the government doesn't actually care about the unwary gambling away their life savings. Rather the government (or those who control it) want to ensure the best investments are kept for themselves. So they place barriers to investment, like accreditation, to ensure only those who already have wealth can participate in the most lucrative of markets. It's not "for your protection" its for the protection of the wealthy.

Bizarro• 8 years ago

So Joe random blogger has to disclose his "thinking process"? "Well, I was thinking about this, so I wrote down this. Then in the shower I had another thought, and that's why I wrote this".

I wish people would think of consequences more. The consequences and logistics of what you're suggesting are horrible. And I think once you have to time to reflect, you'll agree.

ngold• 8 years ago

A well informed, educated citizenry has been the goal. Sadly it looks like a war on education has been waged by the right for decades now. Bush jr. revising bankruptcy law to permanently hobble those seeking an education before the drinking age has never been challenged. Instead college has sky rocketed and spending on public education has plummeted.

simonsarris• 8 years ago

the citizenry is required to have a level of sophistication and erudition

Conveniently 17th century colonial Massachusetts had that too!

the Puritans were a religious group that drew disproportionately from the most educated and education-obsessed parts of the English populace. Literacy among immigrants to Massachusetts was twice as high as the English average, and in an age when the vast majority of Europeans were farmers most immigrants to Massachusetts were skilled craftsmen or scholars. And the Puritan “homeland” of East Anglia was a an unusually intellectual place, with strong influences from Dutch and Continental trade; historian Havelock Ellis finds that it “accounts for a much larger proportion of literary, scientific, and intellectual achievement than any other part of England.”
Furthermore, only the best Puritans were allowed to go to Massachusetts; Fischer writes that “it may have been the only English colony that required some of its immigrants to submit letters of recommendation” and that “those who did not fit in were banished to other colonies and sent back to England”. Puritan “headhunters” went back to England to recruit “godly men” and “honest men” who “must not be of the poorer sort”.

From: http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-see...

Puritans were the original high-IQ eugenicists who wanted to go LARP in the woods. And they did.

rm_-rf_slash• 8 years ago

That was an absolutely delightful read. Thank you so very much.

dqpb• 8 years ago

"Thankfully, we've learned a few things since then"

I think "learning" might be a misleading analogy for how societies evolve... "evolve" is probably also a misleading analogy

thaumaturgy• 8 years ago

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.

moorhosj• 8 years ago

Should we get rid of places like CBC, BBC, NPR? Those are “government defined truth”, they are also highly respected journalists.

jeffdavis• 8 years ago

There are legitimate concerns about that for the same reason as people would be concerned about government-funded churches.

As long as people have many options the concerns are mostly theoretical, but still valid.

SubiculumCode• 8 years ago

There may need to be some sort of compromise however if only this regard: We should not let hostile alien actors have free access to manipulate the political discourse.

Edit: this compromise, to my mind, would not involve the government approving stories, but perhaps restricting internet connectivity to and from those hostile nations.

s2g• 8 years ago

We also know the cost of rapidly disseminated lies. Especially the effect those lies have on trust in mainstream news media (helps fox, hurts everyone else).

ropeadopepope3• 8 years ago

democratic minded people know how dangerous government defined truth (no matter how simple or well accepted) is.

Have we? Take a look at the state of the press in Sweden. It's not much different from China these days. Without freedom of speech, there is no freedom of the press. America is the only country that guarantees either. Although, I will concede that our press isn't much better these days. There's a very real problem when every media outlet in the country is owned by just five companies.

pas• 8 years ago

Take a look at the state of the press in Sweden.

Could you elaborate on that? I guess most people here have no idea of what's the problem there.

hedvig• 8 years ago

I'm sure you also agree that corporate defined truth is equally as dangerous, right?

raven105x• 8 years ago

The bar isn't "too" high, it's somewhere in the 347th E8 lie algebra dimension high. We already live among "ministries of truth", they're just called science journals and studies. No matter how objective a field may seem to outsiders (mathematics, physics, astrology and life sciences), it is often plagued by dogma. The best people can do is pick their battles on what to educate themselves about, and even then the validity of information they find is often suspect. This is the natural outcome of living in the gap after the information explosion yet before fully autonomous verification.

zo1• 8 years ago

The problem is not one of definitions. The problem is that interpretation and ambiguity even comes into the picture. It should be just demonstrable facts, that no one can deny. We've gotten to a point where "questions" and "opinions" and "sources" are being transmitted and amplified to the masses, so of course we all worry about who gets to control that amplification force.

jancsika2• 8 years ago

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 to make nuanced and complicated judgements about the state of their world.

If we take a book from the 80s titled "How to Win at Chess" and try to update it for the 2010s, we have three choices:

1. Add the caveat: "Don't ever play against a computer."

2. Add an enormous chapter about how to use computers to play computer-aided chess which, if serious, would probably double the size of the book.

3. Assume that people smarter and more dedicated than the reader devote entire careers to making sure humans can play chess in an environment where it is difficult to cheat by using a computer.

In laymen's terms: sophistication and erudition just won't cut it. You have three choices:

1. give people a well-lit place to read news that cannot be attacked through the internet.

2. at least double the amount of education people need in order for them to make judgments in a digital world.

3. Assume this is a problem that dedicated career people must solve to keep the population from being trivially manipulated in 100 different ways by 100 different actors when they attempt to read the news.

Which are you advocating here?

lmm2• 8 years ago

In the '80s you would still meet better chess players than you. The techniques for playing against computers are much the same as those for playing against smarter humans. There are specific anti-computer strategies just as there were specific anti-Russian strategies, but they're equally minor.

jernfrost3• 8 years ago

Fake news is what got us dictatorships like Nazi Germany. Spreading lies about socialists and jews was how they gained votes.

In fact the nazis did just like the fox and the trump crowd today and labeled all mainstream news fake.

I don’t think you can dismiss the danger of such news environment. It plunged Germany into dictatorship. A too liberal democracy is vulnurable to totalitarians. We saw this in Egypt when anti-democratic muslim brotherhood gained power through elections.

fiblye• 8 years ago

And controlled "truth" about the west is what keeps North Korea afloat.

When people say that (insert liberty here) is what leads to Nazism, you're not making that liberty seem more dangerous. You're making Nazism seem less bad.

A too liberal democracy is vulnurable to totalitarians. We saw this in Egypt when anti-democratic muslim brotherhood gained power through elections.

At no point in history has Egypt ever been accurately referred to as "a too liberal democracy". Hardline conservative/fundamentalist religious thought is a bigger source of the mess in Egypt than people having freedom.

keiyakins• 8 years ago

Can we at least require you not to call yourself 'whatever news' if you're not at least trying to present factual information?

jccalhoun3• 8 years ago

Interestingly enough in the 18th century Benjamin Franklin wrote tons of fake news stories https://www.hudson.org/research/13133-benjamin-franklin-and-...

throwawayjava2• 8 years ago

I suppose if you consider The Onion fake news...

jccalhoun3• 8 years ago

One of the sites I love to visit every few months is http://literallyunbelievable.org/ which has screen caps of people that don't know what The Onion is.

lopmotr2• 8 years ago

The term only became popular after Trump's win [1], not while it was happening, which is forever (I once read in a real paper newspaper about an amputee who had donkey's legs attached in place of his own). This suggests people don't like it because they went looking for something to blame for his winning. It's entirely a partisan political concern, not a fundamental one.

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

wilsonnb13• 8 years ago

It became popular after he won because he started using the term incorrectly and labeling everything he disagrees with as fake news.

People weren't looking for something to blame his winning on. That's a loaded statement. They were looking for reasons that he won. That's a reasonable thing to do. We've never had a President like him. Our polling methods in the 2016 election didn't predict him winning. Obviously people missed something that was a factor in this election and fake news is one of the things they looked into.

Had Trump not butchered the term I doubt we would still be talking about it much in the public forum.

ixtli7• 8 years ago

I'm not sure why either of these comments is being downvoted. They're both true at the same time, though I agree with you that the parent comment overstates what Trump actually did which was weaponize the critique into something to generally dismiss expert opinion.

makomk• 8 years ago

You're reversing cause and effect. Trump latched onto the term after the entire press started blaming his victory on "fake news" - that's where he got the idea from. (A lot of his ideas seem to just be whatever's been in the press last, actually.)

notMick• 8 years ago

I was in another country, and still seeing the political bias (CNN+) in the reporting. Call me old school, but 'news' and 'journalism' is meant to be impartial. It wasn't. Opinion piece after propaganda opinion piece.

I think maybe, we have just woken up to what is going on.

geggam4• 8 years ago

People also used to do duels over insults and this was considered OK.

We should bring that back. Get triggered demand a duel :)

Enough PC

ixtli7• 8 years ago

I find that the phrase "political correctness" can almost always be replaced with "treating people with respect."

geggam4• 8 years ago

Respect is earned, not given. Giving something away demeans it and makes it worthless.

jessaustin3• 8 years ago

"Respect" seems to be a loaded word. How about we just try for courtesy?

Andre_Wanglin6• 8 years ago

I don't.

lopmotr2• 8 years ago

"treating groups that are perceived as weak with courtesy" Not respect because it can include dishonestly flattering them which disrespects their ability to handle information. Also, not everyone - only members of particular groups. Political correctness advocates can be brutally bullying towards people they don't like the views of.

gowld3• 8 years ago

https://genius.com/Lin-manuel-miranda-ten-duel-commandments-...

    [BURR]
    Can we agree that duels are dumb and immature?

    [HAMILTON]
    Sure
    But your man has to answer for his words, Burr

    [BURR]
    With his life? We both know that’s absurd, sir

    [HAMILTON]
    Hang on, how many men died because Lee was inexperienced and ruinous?

    [BURR]
    Okay, so we’re doin’ this

protomyth2• 8 years ago

I wonder where the government of Massachusetts stance on witches and their accusers fits into the "Fake news was illegal" narrative.

frabbit3• 8 years ago

That was the first thing that popped into my mind. Now you could subsitute "The Russians" or "Paedophiles" or "Terrorists" for that part in the narrative.

ixtli7• 8 years ago

This is cool and interesting however I believe it's worth noting that the more pernicious issue is that the phrase "fake news" is used to discredit expert opinion that doesn't line up with one's preconceived notions. We replicate this by using the term at our own peril.

gowld3• 8 years ago

That perils applies to every single synonym for "false", including "level", "slander", "lie", "troll", etc. You can't police the dictionary as strategy to stop falsehood and false claims about falsehood.

ixtli7• 8 years ago

"You can't police the dictionary as strategy to stop falsehood and false claims about falsehood." This is a beautiful way to explain this that I'm going to appropriate :)

CompanionCuuube• 8 years ago

As was witchcraft.

Social scapegoating as an American institution.

threepipeproblm5• 8 years ago

They also banned Christmas, and most sports.

frabbit3• 8 years ago

And committed genocide against the original inhabitants and wiped out vast numbers of species. So, yeah, laws against Fake News as defined by a bunch of religious maniacs are great.

Andre_Wanglin6• 8 years ago

[citation needed]

The "genocide" of native Americans was a result of European diseases, not barbarism.[1] As the people had no idea of germ theory, it is impossible to claim this was intentional.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...

ppod• 8 years ago

Thou shalt not bear false witness

_emacsomancer_• 8 years ago

I've been reading a lot about pamphleteering in the 1600s. 'Mass media' fake news has been around for quite a while; Cromwell and the Puritans were particularly adept at it.

myf01d• 8 years ago

But fake news didn't mean "news that liberals and leftists don't like" back then

dsfyu404ed• 8 years ago

In case anyone forgot, the other five states in New England don't exist because MA was a welcoming place where the powers that be kept it's nose out of the business of the people. MA has always been the kind of place where you need to watch what you say about the people/groups in charge. It doesn't surprise me at all that speaking out in a provably false way was on the books as a crime in colonial MA.

TangoTrotFox• 8 years ago

This bit is so ironic to the point that I feel they must be trying to convey a message that is not directly stated. 17th century colonial Massachusetts. Doesn't that ring a bell for anybody else? Salem Witch Trials.

In 17th century Massachusetts the just arbiters of truth, naturally being the Massachusetts Government, would soon fall to frenzied lust in pursuit and prosecution of 'witches' for which they tried, convicted, and executed numerous individuals. The same body behind this is the one that was also responsible for judging what was true and what was false and doling out punishment accordingly...

Fake news was illegal in 17th century colonial Massachusetts

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