* Having to delineate between news and opinion more clearly. Fox news is a high profile example, but many news sources do this. The inter mixing of news and opinion without clearly defining what is opinion, leads to the spread of opinion as truth.
* encouraging social media sites to require political ads be transparent of who funds them and make it clear to a viewer.
* require political ads to provide sources for their claims.
* Bring back some form of the fairness doctrine to prevent hyper partisan news.
Accountability to me means, there should be transparency to the consumer of news of where the content is coming from, differentiating news and opinion ,and providing them with the direct means to learn more.
A large part of the article is about how there's no easy paper trail for the lay person to verify their source.
I would like to take the emotion and deceit out of politics and news. Free speech is great, but it hasn't scaled well with the unfettered ability for deceit to be part of it. There should be solutions to provide more free speech while allowing people to curtail the inherent deceit that it also allows, by arming them with the mental tools to do so.
Those are good starts. I'd add that one of the biggest problem with free speech currently is that we allow actors to speak and publish content that we don't even know are real Citizen of the US. And we allow people to speak and publish content at scales that are unprecedented.
I think this is a big issue that somehow people don't talk about as much. It isn't free speech that's so much being attacked, more so we are trying to define the framework of free speech on the internet.
There is one perspective that could say the internet is like anything else, and so free speech applies the same. Except the internet isn't like anything else. It hides people behind anonymity, it allows actors that arn't american or even real to present themselves as if they were and speak to US affairs. It makes it trivial to decimate false claims to a greater audience at almost no cost. And the platforms of information built around it have designed automated systems to burry high quality discourse and instead promote sensational headlines.
To me, this is similar to problems of spam, phishing, fraud and abuse that say Amazon faces on its store front, like counterfeit, fake reviews, bot accounts, money laundering, etc. Democracy on the internet faces similar problems of fraud and abuse. And just like Amazon needs a framework to mitigate those fraud and abuses, our democracy needs it as well.
I really like those. Verifiability and paper trail seem very important.
I’d recommending not using the term accountability if these are the things you mean. Generally it has the connotation of being responsible for outcomes.
I also think that there is possibly a false dichotomy between free speech and news here. As if regulating news is somehow the same thing as curtailing free speech. I’m not sure it needs to be so stark.
If we introduced some or all of these regulations, we could simply attach them to the use of ‘news’ as a product description. I.e. If you don’t do these things, you can’t sell a product called news.
This would be similar to not being able to call yourself a medical doctor or police officer without he right credentials.
As far as I can see free speech is a red-herring. We should preserve it strongly, but also introduce a category of media product that has certain guarantees or protections.
The main point of the article is that the free speech laws in this country have clouded the divide between free speech for individuals, and the rights for media companies and political parties to spread misinformation as they see fit.
What you're proposing in your last paragraph is what the article is proposing too. The issue is that under the guise of an absolutist take of free speech, we've now put all free speech under the same banner.
To apply protections to the categories of media would require rethinking what free speech means and who it applies to.
IMHO free speech is great. It just needs certain measures around transparency and corporate lobbying to prevent it being brought down with the bad actors
I actually don’t see the article proposing what I am proposing. For the most part it is a good analysis, but I don’t see much about defining what ‘news’.
The New York Times isn’t the fountain of garbage that Fox News can be, but neither is it any more principled. It’s just usually better.
They have a vested interest in this being about social media rather than news, and the article focuses tech rather than news when it comes to solutions. I didn’t see where they addressed the issue of what to do about Fox News, for example.
