Why "Every person in the world needs media literacy" is astro-turf.
The long history of fake news | Elizabeth Mehren | TEDxBerkeley - is a sales pitch to profit from the disinformation industry. Nobody wants that industry.
The long history of fake news | Elizabeth Mehren | TEDxBerkeley - is a sales pitch to profit from the disinformation industry. Nobody wants that industry.
Democracy is not working as it should, and that is because one thing was built into our systems to protect the "ruling classes" - secrecy. And without knowledge of the facts of what is being done by our elected representatives, there is no accountability, no control, no democracy, and corruption and incompetence have room to exist.
In small primitive egalitarian societies, there was no secrecy or "privacy" - everyone saw and heard everything.
In anything bigger than a few houses, and events and science too large for any individual to be an expert on, professional media is necessary to investigate the facts, fact check, look at alternatives, and inform everyone so they can exercise democratic control.
It's a full time job for hundreds once you get to a country the size of New Zealand. And it simply doesn't work if there is false information around because people don't have time or resources to fact check lies, let alone find the truth.
Don't be fooled, this video is astro-turf disinformation, selling disinformation itself.
"Media literacy" - is the same as every person, regardless of age or ability, being told to get a black belt in Karate to defend themselves and their children and parents against robbery, rape and murder.
Actually, there is this thing people invented called laws which are supposed to protect us from danger in our normal lives.
Instead of enforcing and developing protections for the information age, in 2012 the notoriously corrupt US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) invented a "right to lie". The biggest gaslight since "Russia is in the UN". Pretending that publishing of lies for profit isn't fraud1.
Corrupt fraudsters and their cult followers persuaded the US Government to remove, protection of information. Saying "the truth is a slippery slope".
No, lies are the slippery slope. There’s nowhere to slip with proven truth.
With that new "right to lie", “US” communications giants (usually domiciled in Ireland, Maldives or other tax haven) destroy democracy in the US and throughout the world, poison our information systems and kill people's ability to see what they are doing. Forcing other countries to expend resources defending our populations from information poisoning by the US.
And then we get BS like this "talk" - schemes to make money off unfortunate victims of corrupt US government policy.
BTW, before the "right to lie", everyone could tell the difference between truth and lies. We were taught about it, and about scientific testing, in primary (elementary) school. Now state-protected disinformation lies about what is truth and tells us there is no science.
So this eminent academic and "journalist" who does not expose the fallacy underlying her "bright idea" is a waste of space. An influential proponent of the problem
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Let's have a referendum on whether people want to be told lies by sources we rely on for information!
Who seriously expects every person in the world, irrespective of age and intelligence, to waste our entire lives to fact check every single thing we see? Why should we have to?
That is what we employed media to do. The 4th essential component of democracy. It's why we put requirements on them to report the truth, fully and fairly. Abolished in 1987 in the US, then a right to lie invented in 2012. The ultimate corruption.
So now we have to go back to a pre-media era, and build our own wheels? Why? For whom?
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Disinformation is an evil, pernicious industry intended to make profit and cause damage and enable theft and oppression with impunity.
We have fraud laws. Deception with intent to obtain a benefit or cause loss. That law needs to be enforced.
Clicks, votes and advertising revenue are benefits.
Confusion, mental distress, wasted time, exposure to misleading advertising, buying defective products, disinformation wars and the administrative chaos, threats, abuse, slanders, fear and physical harm which result, being ruled by people who lie to us, are losses.
Freedom from lies and hate speech is absolutely essential for society to function. Making money selling “answers” to victims of disinformation itself is the ultimate cynicism.
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So, how about the US requires their media do the fact checking like they used to, and outlaw publication of disinformation and hate, and suppression of information. Like it used to be. Like Canada Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ Code of Ethics (2002) · CBSC / CCNR and many other countries still do.
The only way to effectively put an end to the problem is to recognise that lies (assertions or insinuations of "facts" which are not true), and hiding or omitting the truth, are not "information" or "opinion" and so are not within the protected freedom of expression - and to criminalise public dissemination of lies. Jokes are OK, they are not claiming to be truth.
Automatic Infringement fines like parking tickets for sharing or spreading existing disinformation
(strict liability in the English law sense - -no intention required, the only defence is "it wasn't me", or "it is true". (Will make people think before spreading.)
If you like, in the US, you can have a positive defence that the lie did not cause any benefit to anyone involved in the publication (creator/publisher/spreader) and did not cause damage to any other person, and was not intended to do either. If the offender goes to court and produces evidence that there was no benefit and no harm, and no intention to obtain a benefit or cause harm, the state must prove intention, benefit or harm, on the balance of probabilities.
Serious fines and option of imprisonment for uploading misinformation.
Social and all other public media automatic fines per view, plus imprisonment for creating disinformation, algorithms promoting disinformation or hate, and for failing to remove hate and disinformation, suppressing true information (includes removing true posts, or pure opinion expressed as such).
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It's not difficult. It's not dangerous.
That is propaganda spread by those wanting to profit from spreading disinformation.
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The internet is nothing more than a roadway, to information. Roads are almost universally recognised as public infrastructure, publicly owned, and publicly regulated and maintained for public safety and usefulness. People are required to have licences to drive on them. Anyone is free to travel anonymously, as passengers. People get banned and punished for dangerous or negligent behaviour putting others at risk.
Why should the internet be any different?
Imagine if all the roads in the world were privately owned by the 5 tech giants, who
- refused to provide road rules, refused to keep them safe, refused to accept liability for damage, deaths and maiming from their negligence, and refused to make homicidal and negligent drivers answerable.
- collected and sold personal information collected about every person that travelled on the roads: facial and physical identity, financial data from toll payments, their vehicles, how they drove, where they went, how long they were there, their IP addresses, hardware and software used, communication identities, and all data transmissions from their electronic devices, while they were on the roads.
- randomly forced people to go to locations they didn't want to go to, prevented access to people's local shopping resources, friends' and relatives' addresses, libraries and workplaces, either by making people drive thousands of miles, or blocking them off altogether - for payment, for political reasons, or to make people stay on the roads for longer being exposed to disinformation and uncontrolled fraudulent advertising as they were driving.
While governments stood by and wrung their hands, created a "right to drive dangerously", and said it was up to road users to stop reckless drivers and homicidal maniacs from killing them.
There you have the "cloud capital" as it is today: the internet, the new serfdom where your information is sold and you pay to see lies.
TBC.
Fraud:
