China Says Terrorism, Fake News Impel Greater Global Internet Curbs (reuters.com) 143
China's ambitions to tighten up regulation of the Internet have found a second wind in old fears -- terrorism and fake news. Chinese officials and business leaders speaking at the third World Internet Conference held in Wuzhen last week called for more rigid cyber governance, pointing to the ability of militants to organize online and the spread of false news items during the recent U.S. election as signs cyberspace had become dangerous and unwieldy. From a report on Reuters: Ren Xianling, the vice minister of China's top internet authority, said on Thursday that the process was akin to "installing brakes on a car before driving on the road." Ren, number two at the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), recommended using identification systems for netizens who post fake news and rumors, so they could "reward and punish" them. The comments come as U.S. social networks Facebook and Twitter face a backlash over their role in the spread of false and malicious information generated by users, which some say helped sway the U.S. presidential election in favor of Republican candidate Donald Trump.
Thanks Obama! (Score:1, Insightful)
Obama shows once again how he is a global citizen by complaining about Fake News just like China.
Thank you Obama, if only you could save us from Trump.
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Everyone except trolls complain about it. The difference is in what one proposes to do about it. Obama does not propose gov't censoring, unlike the Chinese.
Nope, it looks like we gotta ride this one out. Let's just hope Donald not as distract-able, child-like, and A.D.D.-ish as he seemed during the campaign.
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Gov't censorship? Reference/quote please.
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Obama does not propose gov't censoring, unlike the Chinese.
In America, we don't need government censorship because the corporations do it instead.
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Are you implying that the corporations aren't the government?
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It's like the old joke:
Q: What's the difference between fascism and capitalism?
A: In fascism, the governments own the corporations. In capitalism, it's the other way around.
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I like your joke and raise it with this one [from long time ago behind the wall]:
Capitalism is humans exploiting humans. Communism is the other way way around.
Seriously, your joke is the sadder one since the "communist system" is gone; whereas the problems illuminated by you stand and if anything it gets worst. While /. is discussing the future of no jobs and automation in the world, leaders are on the rise that plan to increase the working week [e.g. France], cut jobs, lower taxes and trump [ha-ha] on ever
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[Sig] Enlightened SJW: Trump is racist against Mexico which is why I'm moving from L.A. to Vancouver to show solidarity! I don't get it. Somebody care to explain this? Did those wanting to move to Canada pledge to stay for battle or something? If so, please link it. --
They have already stated the do not want the SJW/snowflakes in their country.
Of course they would (Score:5, Insightful)
China has no freedom of speech recognized in their constitution. They guarantee no one their right to speak out.
So yes, they would indeed be willing to manage the Internet in a way that would permit governing bodies to deny access and remove content.
In their country, I have nothing much to say about it.
In my country, however, I expect the government to protect and defend my rights, speech being among them.
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Their idea of "fake news" may also be somewhat broader than our own.
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In China, fake news is anything that criticizes the government.
Re:Of course they would (Score:4, Insightful)
In China, fake news is anything that criticizes the government.
That happens to be the same type of fake news people are complaining about in the US today.
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In a couple of months, "fake news" will be anything sympathetic to the government. (or at least the Trump Administration)
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You're wasting your breath. These pricks know the crap that will occur for the next four years will be ugly, and they'll get blamed for it, and are preparing themselves to dial up their own persecution complex to 11 as a way of putting their fingers in their ears and saying "nahnahnahnahnah I can't hear you".
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Re:Of course they would (Score:4, Funny)
Well as fast as free speech world rankings go, the USA is 41st in the world
Yeah, I'm sure these rankings are completely unbiased.
Any ranking that shows the US as lower than #1 in free speech or freedom of the press is clearly false and should be illegal.
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Re: Of course they would (Score:2, Informative)
FYI China *does* have freedom of speech in their Constitution. See Article 35.
Now whether that actually means anything in practice is another story...
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It is usually superseded by other Articles in court, such as
Article 52 It is the duty of citizens of the People’s Republic of China to safeguard the unification of the country and the unity of all its nationalities.
Article 54 It is the duty of citizens of the People’s Republic of China to safeguard the security, honour and interests of the motherland; they must not commit acts detrimental to the security, honour and interests of the motherland.
Article 55 It is the sacred duty of every citizen of
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China has no freedom of speech recognized in their constitution.
Most countries don't. This is something relatively unique to the USA and quite clearly not required as part of a functioning democracy.
In my country, however, I expect the government to protect and defend my rights, speech being among them.
You're a fool. The government does not do anything to protect you or defend your rights. Quite the opposite actually, the constitution specifically protects you from your government.
Re: Of course they would (Score:2)
... And so well we've just elected am outsider to redirect it to that task.
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China has little interest in exporting it's model of government. There is a tendency in the West to think everyone is like the US or Russia, determined to spread ideology.
China isn't really interested in controlling the internet beyond its own borders. In fact, that would be counter productive for it.
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How long have you been speaking for China? Do you draw a salary as an ambassador?
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There might be a little silver lining in that though: most of the fake news people are small scale bloggers and the like, not people who can afford to pay extra for a fast lane. Losing net neutrality may curtail the fake news stories a little bit.
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Censors love this story (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems like a wonderful way to export only real news approved by the despotic government of your choice.
Can you say doubleplusgood?
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It seems like a wonderful way to export only real news approved by the despotic government of your choice.
Can you say doubleplusgood?
Didn't you mean "doubleplusungood"?
You know, like today's Slashdot. Not intended as a personal criticism, but just a comment on the state of today's Slashdot. Your comment could only be regarded as "insightful" for the weakest and smallest values of insight. Ditto the other "insightful" posts. No funny posts at all, whereas there was a time when they were the main motivation to visit Slashdot. These days? Apparently the primary motivation nowadays is just having too much free time on my hands.
Anyway, on the
China Freer than Trump's America (Score:1)
China has long been ahead of American Republican idiocy, and as one of the most successful states of the 21st century it will now lead. The internet functions as a global-scale community message board which can not be even be used by the community it was built to serve due to nuisance influences driven by greed. The recent failure of US is a sign of warning of the Russian influence in so called 'unregulated' communications, in fact those are most open to abuse by hidden parties.
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Horse sh*t (Score:3)
China is ahead in terms of what exactly? Human rights abuses and tyranny? Okay, you got me on that one. Personal productivity and innovation are pathetically low in China. Most of the advancements come from theft from foreign Governments because oppression stifles both productivity and innovation. If China had a 2nd amendment and right to speech the Government would be overthrown, and the Chinese government knows as much. Which is why Chinese people have neither.
The "American Republican idiocy" you de
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Your prison system is a modern versions of slavery where inmates are forced to work so the prison owners ca make more profit
You are dropping more munitions on more countries in the world than anyone else it.
You hide POWs in other countries where torture is OK.
Your politicians are basically corrupt, hell Trump is already trying to use his elected authority to get buildings the go ahead in other countries.
Your illegal s
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Stop selectively reading. The last couple decades of push to tyranny is what is causing the downfall, not personal liberty and accountability which lead to our peak.
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LOL. Just fucking LOL. I guarantee you on any one of these points that China is 100x worse.
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China is ahead in terms of what exactly? Human rights abuses and tyranny?
China is way ahead of the US in terms of capital-punishment efficiency. They actually have lethal injection beds in panel vans. Far more efficient. And Chinese citizens can be executed for far more infractions. Drug dealing, corruption. etc.
You reap what you sow (Score:2, Informative)
Of course, a particular subset of democrats are completely on board with censoring "racists" ... as everyone who disagrees with them is racist.
China using the same censorship as liberals (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of liberals in the west are currently labelling conservative websites as "fake news" and demanding they be filtered on Google, Facebook and other sites. The liberals making these censorship demands see themselves as good people and believe that censorship is necessary for the greater good. However, I think they should take a moment to reflect on this article.
The Chinese government isn't exactly known for being champions of freedom and justice. They're known for oppressive censorship of all opposing opinions. They censor and imprison anyone who publicly opposes the Communist Party because they believe the Communist Party is right and just, and that anyone opposed to the communist party is a public menace.
This are a lot of parallels between what the Chinese government is doing and what liberals are doing in the west today. Just as the Chinese are now branding news that the Communist Party doesn't like as "fake news" and censoring it, liberals in the west are branding all news sits they don't like as "fake news" and demanding it be censored. Just as the Communist Party imprisons people who speak out against its agenda, liberals in the west use laws against "hate speech" to silence, publish and imprison people who speak out against their agenda. It's interesting that liberals have become a lot like oppressive dictators and are using the same censorship mechanisms to crush free speech and open debate.
Liberals, do you really want to create a society like China's were freedom of speech is dead and where anyone who speaks out is harshly published?
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The current Fake News hysteria in the US is a reaction to Hillary loosing the election. They will put up any excuse so they can blame instead of taking responsibly for running a campaign that lost.
21st-century "Stabbed in the back" (Score:5, Insightful)
Nearly a hundred years ago, an Austrian corporal rose to power in Germany by blaming Germany's loss in WW1 on being "stabbed in the back" by Jews. Let's just say that did not end well.
The Democrats' elite tilted the playing field to ensure Hillary Clinton a victory in the primaries. Given her scandals and political baggage, she was the absolute worst possible candidate they could've picked. Any no-name Democrat representative/senator/governor would've walked all over Trump. But no, they insisted on Hillary, and ran a lousy campaign to boot.
Now the Democrats' establishment is refusing to take the blame, and is going after social media, and the web in general. If you think Chinese web censorship is bad, wait until the next Democrat president in the US.
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Hold on a sec. There is a big difference between suggesting or pressuring private news organizations from spreading disinformation or sloppy information, AND having the gov't do it or enforce it.
I don't know any prominent progressive politician suggesting gov't censo
Re:China using the same censorship as liberals (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the point the OP was trying to make is that liberals also have an ideology and object to news content that runs counter to their ideology. Objecting to factual information based on ideological adherence is the problem.
My own local newspaper has actually been doing this for over a decade. They *used* to include the race of a suspect in descriptions and arrest reporting, but dropped it because they felt it was prejudicial. It didn't matter that the *police* issued a press release saying that they were looking for a black male, aged 18-25 or that they had charged $Criminal, a black male, age 19 for committing a crime.
They were perfectly willing to suppress material facts made public by law enforcement because it conflicted with a multiculturalist ideology. Consistently reporting on high levels of black crime undermined their multicultural agenda and ideology, so they chose to suppress it as much as possible.
The irony has always been that the layout/copy desk doesn't always follow the agenda, they occasionally run mug shot photos after arrests. True to form race isn't mentioned in the article, but by displaying the picture, someone is thumbing their nose at the editorial policy.
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It's possibly just business: many of customers are probably minorities who may feel that doing such just increases racism or hatred against their group.
It's not too different from Fox News covering or emphasizing stories of the gov't screwing up and de-emphasizing stories of the private sector screwing up.
It's more profitable to tell your customers what they want to hear and suppress what they don't want to hear.
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Probably *not* just business because African Americans are around 5% of the population and I doubt enough of the paper's readership even reads the back pages of the local news section for a business-altering subset of the readership to care.
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But maybe that 5% care a lot while the other 95% don't care enough to counter the sales-related issues of that 5%. It's not just the number of people, but also HOW much they care about an issue. Hispanics may also have a related opinion.
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Both parties have been lax on enforcing anti-trust. Remember, "anti-trust" is regulation of business, and GOP traditionally does not want regulation of business.
I know some conservatives who believe the market eventually "solves" monopolies on its own such that anti-trust enforcement allegedly isn't needed. For example, IBM grew too comfortable such that microcomputers eventually ate its lunch. While possibly, true, it also took a couple of decades to play out. Plus, IBM was under anti-trust investigation a
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Lol, the reason it's "easier to dupe conservatives" is because for the last 8 years they've been the ones losing and rabidly fear-mongering about Obama.
Quick IQ test: Who do you think will be easier to dupe with fake news over the next 4 years?
Obama Derangement Syndrome has become Trump Derangement Syndrome, that's all. Granted Trump is an embarrassment and there's certainly more to worry about with Trump, but not to the degree the left is losing its shit.
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I thought China's main worry about the Internet... (Score:3)
I thought China's main worry about the Internet was accurate news?
And I say: (Score:1)
China, and other governments/corporations that finance terrorism and fake news impel greater global circumvention of their attempted curbs.
So there!
Repeal act but yet... (Score:2)
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I, as a consumer of information, welcome the ability to filter out utter crap that wastes my time or tries to con me (thus, wasting my time since I'm no mark, but for my neighbors, possibly causing real problems which ripple out to make my own life more tedious.) Also, as a consumer I value free speech and do not care for having things filtered for political agendas. The "fake news" conversation is one I welcome, because it may inspire better mechanisms by which misinformation and disinformation is easily
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But really, what "asshat conservatives" have been talking about "fake news"? I have only been hearing liberal democrats going on how it's such
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those who would misuse the conversation to either spread more misinformation or limit helpful free speech -- be they asshat conservatives
...this replied to with a slew of ridiculous strawmen... and then...
But really, what "asshat conservatives" have been talking about "fake news"?
Q.E.D.
Fake (Score:1)
Why all of the sudden is there so much fuss over fake news? Growing up I was always told to believe only half of what I see, hear, or read from any news source. The real trick was knowing which half to believe. Granted I would modify this to about 10% now, still the idea is that all media should be treated as suspect, look for the source and who has something to gain or loose from the story, then judge the worth of the news. Still sound advice.
Now I get the whole notion that fake news stories are suppos
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No, it's because T lied better. Automation is much bigger threat to blue-collar jobs than outsiders. H's re-training plans were thus a more logical solution to job loss in middle America. T simply sold the wrong solution better, leveraging the primitive emotion of xenophobia.
Logic Lost and is why us nerds should be pissed.
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Retraining plans? Seriously? We should crowd everybody into the Universities where they can be indoctrinated and when they get out they can lubricate the bearings on industrial robots??
Now, we all know that Ms. Clinton is a policy wonk, and I am certain she had some devastatingly boring ideas to propose. But she lost.
Elections have consequences, I remember some dunderhead say.
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but really. I can't think of one person I came into contact within months prior to the election who didn't already know who they were voting for and nothing was going to change their minds.
How do you think they got that way? You'd be surprised how much of this recalcitrance can be linked back to some bullshit they read a year ago, believed at the time, never figured out was patently false, and then mentally digested and forgot the details of, leaving only the aftertaste of "X sucks". Basically the "fuss" is just many people deciding that this ongoing problem evidenced by polls showing absurd numbers of people believing absurd, easily falsifiable "facts" is something they are fed up with, an
Education and Critical Thinking (Score:2, Insightful)
Or, we could educate people on how to determine what a credible source is and teach people critical thinking skills.
Most of the "fake news" articles were blog posts, reddit threads, and sites that popped up to pander to fears for advertising dollars. Stuff that was easy to spot as being fake.
Yeah, sometimes I would see the "fake" sites come up with a real story a couple days before everyone else did, but generally the real sites were better researched and less blatantly biased than the "fake" article.
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Problem is that reality has a well known left wing bias, so how can we ever trust it? Probably taking orders from Clinton or whoever the new mastermind of the left is.
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You forgot to capitalize 'Reality.' When it's used as a proper noun you are supposed to do that.
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That the Pope endorsed Donald is a common one.
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It's a blurry line. One laughable story I remember making the rounds on even (somewhat) legitimate tech sites was "OMG Trump has a hidden server that's communicating with Russia and it proves he's collaborating with them!".
They can try to defend it by saying "well, that's what the 'researcher' actually said, so it's not a lie or fake!" but it's so silly as to be more or less the equivalent of a fake story.
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Does /. count as legitimate? That dumbass shit [slashdot.org] was making the rounds here too.
Idk, I kinda feel like /. doesn't count as even (somewhat) legitimate. I'll hold off until I see what the Cows troll and APK has to say about it.
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Try filtering his stories out using the options. It helps a bit.
of course (Score:2)
Fake News vs Bias (Score:1)
'Ability to organize' (Score:2)
Also, the Internet is all to blame for fake news stories, because no one ever in Human history since the invention of 'news' has ever misreported anything, or made shit up to sway public opinion, either. Of course the Chinese government never indulges in fake news or propaganda themselves, now do they? {/sarcasm}
Oh and just a reminder: Any
Need AI, not censorship (Score:2)
We need an impartial AI with a built in sense of humour, which can first analyze the credibility and objectivity of each news story and purported fact, and can then heap the appropriate amount of deserved witty ridicule on the blatantly false or heavily unreasonably biased "news" stories and facts.
Its code should be FOSS so that it can be seen to be an objective reasoning and learning algorithm. It must apply its own "truth"/"credibility" ranking to all the data it uses to build up its common-sense knowledg
rolleyes (Score:4)
Fake news might be a problem, which has been extremely sensationalized in the past few months, but authoritarianism wouldn't make it any better. If anything, it'd just take fake news to it's ultimate consequences. Better to have fake news that are exposed as fake than having fake news spread by a government that will turn them into real news at their own convenience.
Education, better critical reasoning, being able to tell what is better for yourself and in turn for your country will always be the more difficult but ultimately better route.
Dictatorships and authoritarian regimes will always try to appeal to people's sense of fear and inaction.
People who want the state/government to take control of every aspect of their lives can move to a country like North Korea to see how it's like. They have tons of "real news" to share with you, how their leader is God on Earth, how their country is the best, how their technology is the most advanced, etc.
So yeah Ren Xianling, you can shove your promotion of censorship up your ass. I can handle what I choose to believe myself on the Internet. And the last organization I'll trust to select what I should and should not hear is the government. Very precious coming from a government that actively puts people in jail and blocks webpages that talks about Tianamen Square protests, having some backwards moral police with feet firmly planted back in the dark ages with a whole lot of puritanism going on, among some other ridiculous stuff.
I personally don't have any problems with chinese people, companies and ideas... but get the f*ck outta here with their politics. Country where a bunch of people kill themselves because they feel trapped into workplaces with no welfare and no human rights... what a great government. And if you dare complaining about it, you end up in jail for spreading some "fake news" . heh
How about how "fake news" applies to the US? (Score:1)
The right to free speech comes great responsibility.
The heavy-handed approach that China is taking to the "fake news" problem is fundamentally different than ours. What works for them cannot work for us. In the US, we have a long history of protected speech and we would not be where we are now if we didn't. We are a country of people from all parts of the world. Free speech is a fundamental tool we use to find common ground.
Obnoxious and repugnant forms of speech are protected
Car analogy (Score:2)
Government control is not "installing brakes in your car". It is giving the control of your brakes (and everything else in the car, including the view through the windshield) to the government, so that you can only drive on approved roads.
Re: China (Score:2)
China is moving hard on the fake news thing because they couldn't stand it if the US got more censorious than they are....
That's rich.. (Score:3)
Discussing plans (Score:2)
China cannot understand We invented it, Occident? (Score:1)