I think the main focus here should be the word “influencers”.
One thing is for a relatively unknown person to speak about any kind of topic even if they know nothing about it.
But when someone with millions of followers spreads misinfo, that is dangerous as it can end up killing lots of people.
People with a certain amount of followers should be held accountable for what they say the same way that a newspaper should.
Yup, as someone who loosely follows streamer drama, this is kinda based.
Imagine the h3h3/Hasan drama if this was a thing
sure, but that’s not what this is doing. it doesn’t say they’ll be held accountable. it just places a high barrier to entry.
i understand the sentiment behind it, but I don’t think this will be effective at curtailing disinformation. it would, however, be a very useful tool for controlling online speech. especially with a government that has so much control over its universities.
If we held news accountable for misinformation then fox and all the other fascist networks wouldn’t even exist.
I don’t see the problem with that.
That sounds desirable.
It just becomes a question who decides what is and isn’t mis/disinformation. Imagine the trump regime doing this.
Yeah, I think if it’s more about policing the misinformation influencers spread, then I can calm down a bit, although it still makes me nervous to think about the government picking and choosing what a person with a crowd can say.
For now, it’s making sure influencers don’t spread anti-vax bullshit, but what if tomorrow it’s no talking about Palestine?
Even then, medical professionals themselves can fall to propaganda and spread lies, so we can’t use a single person as an arbiter of truth.
Yeah I gotta agree with you on this, there’s a frankly insane amount of pull these people have in society and as we saw during the pandemic not only did it cause people to endanger their own health, but those of others around them.
There’s a lot of nuance to be discussed and Republicans shouldn’t be in the room at all when it is, but yeah this is objectively true. We used to have laws regulating the news for a reason.
I can see how this would play out in the states. First you make it so only degreed people can talk about certain things. Then you dismiss them as educated elite ivory tower academics. Because we live in a nation that scorns experience and expertise.
Someone asked for an example the other day of something that didn’t believe was true and I listed seven. They dismissed me with “I didn’t ask for an encyclopedia.” It was the best way they could ignore that someone knew more than them and not have to actually process the information they explicitly asked for.
Sounds like they thought they could just argue on easy mode by putting the burden of proof on you. When you accommodated their request, that blew up their spot. Having no other recourse, they retreated to an insult since there was nothing else for them to do (but they were seething to get the last word, so you got that response).
Good on ya for making the fucker squirm.
I know that there is absolutely zero chance of educating some that doesn’t want to learn. But I also know that online others are reading and those people are either looking for information they can use in future conversations or they don’t have a vested interest in the conversation and can be reached even if they don’t poke their heads up to be seen.
That’s 100% the reason I’ll bother with these idiots when i do. Sometimes it’s also a chance for me to further prove out my logic and refine my arguments and understanding of the topic as well, so it can be a win-win-win in the best case scenario (troll proven wrong+me learning something new/refining my knowledge+bystanders learning why the troll is wrong)
Nah, if this happened in the US someone would just set up a diploma mill and rake in the money.
But then you can’t claim to be fighting the system against all those academics. You lose credibility once you have credentials, even diploma mill ones.
Turkey requires a college degree to become president. Then they started revoking the college degrees of the opposition candidates.
Pro gamer move.
This is quintessential “Modern CPP”
Take a real problem screwing up the western world bad (like influencer mis/disinformation), and smash it in a way only their massive state apparatus can…
Superficially.
It’s “proof” their party line works and, as always, a good way to control the populace, if abused. It’s probably effective, but not as effective as it appears on the surface.
I’m sympathetic here.
In past years I was a “free internet” libertarian leaning diehard, but something has to be done about algos boosting shameless outrage peddlers; it’s literally destroying the planet and our collective psyche, just for short term corporate benefit (Or corpo-state benefit in China’s case, as its “Big Tech” is under the party’s thumb). But China just took the problem and used it as an excuse for more control.
The issue is our society encourages it. When the most important thing in life is money, people are gonna do shit like this to exploit others. Take away the possibility of profit for grifting people and the incentive to do this drops. Would it completely go away? No, there will always be stupid grifters striving to gain popularity or attention, but I think that without the monetary factor it would be a negligible presence.
I don’t agree. Tons of folks spend tons of time influencing for basically no financial gain (or the platform taking the vast majority of it). Attention is everything.
In other cases, people are just tribal, and like following someone.
That’s always been (and will always be) an issue, but the monster of this story is engagement optimizing design. Technology has made this human tendency extremly dangerous, and “engagement at any cost” needs to be a social taboo.
This is quintessential “Modern CPP".
Ah yes, the Chinese Pommunist Party
China Plus Plus
I like the idea of not letting stupid people spread misinformation on the internet (unless it’s myself), but this is just gatekeeping the right to speak out in public about certain topics which I find deeply problematic.
There’s got to be something to do for accountability, but ….
Just want to point out the guy who made up the whole vaccine-autism scare was a scientist. All of the propaganda against anti-smoking, anti-climate change, anti-pollution, anti-lead efforts over the years has been produced by scientists
Educated people are people too. Just because they should know better doesn’t mean they are
You’re spot on with accountability. Why not just legally allow people harmed by following the advice to be ableto sue the influencers and allow those with proper credentials to become certified in the topic and certification protects from lawsuits?
Or maybe not the second part. Anybody giving bad advice should be sued.
“This isn’t medical advice, but drinking battery acid will allow you to live forever.” Would never hold up in court.
Freedom of speech seems to be the most misunderstood right.
The challenging part is a lot of it is indirect. General incitement to violence or misinformation is difficult to tie back to directly causing harm.
Freedom of speech was simpler before internet when you were likely singled out as a kook and ignored. Now with the internet you have a much bigger audience as well as other kooks where you can build on each other. Your reach is farther, you can more easily appear to have common opinion, you can do more harm, and yet are more distanced from the harm you do.
I have no idea what to do differently but we’ve seen free speech in an online world without any accountability has been able to do a lot of harm.
Yeah, I think more is being lost here than “solved”. Sometimes you need to ask simple questions about complex things. Ask any teacher and they’ll say that students deepen their own understanding just as much as they teach back. It’s part of the flow of creative ideas and inspiration. Everybody should have the right to be curious, ask questions, learn and make new discoveries.
Instead, this feels like “You are only allowed to have ideas once you’ve gone through the propogandization program to have the right ones”. But I still do agree that we need to start trying lots of things to combat misinformation. Maybe a rebrand of education to show how much more interesting reality is than conspiracy theories. A focus on the truth that so much remains unknown, and conspiracy theories are like unhealthy junk food that never satiates that truth.
Surface-level, seems good idea. In practice, it depends entirely on who gets to define an “influencer”, what is a “serious topic”, what activities meet the threshold of “speaking on” that topic, and which universities’ degrees will be respected and which won’t. It seems like a very flexible framework that their government could use to remove nearly any person from any platform for any reason. If I post “fruit is good for you” on a social platform and someone else sees it, that falls under these rules as I understand them. I anticipate selective enforcement of these rules against those not aligned with the CCP, in fact the rules seems to be specifically written with that in mind.
In China, the level of trust people have in the Government is very high compared to the US and Europe. That is the reason why this policy would work and would have reasonable public support.
In the US or Europe, a policy that seems reasonable but could be exploited by the Government for political control is a bad policy. In China, people have already sort of accepted that the Government is pretty secure in its position so it really doesn’t need to suppress speech in roundabout ways; if the intention is to suppress speech then they will be explicit about it by using the words “this threatens state security” or “this is offensive to public morals”. The thing about being a secure authoritarian regime with reasonable popular support is that you don’t need to come up with pretexts to suppress speech or dissent. You can just say “this threatens our power” and put a stop to it. If the policy states the goal is to stop uninformed people from spewing nonsense on the Internet then people will accept that to be true, and the reality is that it probably is what the goal is.
“They are so powerful that they no longer tell lies” isn’t a take I think human history would support.
I do not claim that. The Chinese government absolutely lies when they need to. I am just saying that they have a track record of not lying in this manner, because they don’t need to.
Removed by mod
America is already censoring free speech indirectly. Censorship from platforms. Shadowbans. Now even directly arresting and deporting it.
But look at Julian Assagne or Edward Snowden to see the myth of free speech.
The solution is to aggressively regulate the platforms, not the people posting. Saying dumb shit like “drink horse dewormer” is free speech; providing a platform to push that awful advice to millions of people is not a protected right.
What? You mean you’ll have to actually KNOW something , before you blather on about it? That’s un-American!
Which is precisely why China’s quickly taking the world leadership title away from the US.
Needing the Chinese government’s blessing of your online activities, is, I totally agree, very un-American.
Idk how to feel about this. If this news came from the UK, the replies would’ve been:
you got a loicense for that, mate?
But because it’s China, people will gladly glaze this move.
“Nanny State”
Somehow we don’t get memed on for that, even though it’s all the same downunder.
Americans: “This is censorship” Also hundreds of American dumbass youtubers: "Covid vaccine makes you a transhuman robot; drink horse de-wormer instead. " Also american dumb shit tech ceo’s talking out of their asses about shit they never studied: “Trans people are a conspiracy against humanity.” The list goes on and on.
Well like, yeah, it is in fact censorship. I don’t think it’s a fundamentally bad idea by any stretch, but if it were implemented here in the US it would be instantly abused to dictate the political narrative. Given that’s the basis pretty much all american commentators are basing their reactions from, and that chinese citizens are restricted from sharing their impression with the broad internet, it’s understandable why the narrative on this topic is that way. The opposing viewpoints are all contained within a country that is extremely ideologically isolationist.
For what it’s worth, China isn’t particularly better on the issue of abusing policy to dictate the political narrative either. As examples of some of the concerns I’ve seen expressed by my chinese colleagues about this: nobody is clear (neither on english-language sites or on what chinese news sites said colleagues can access) about what these rules would actually entail - Will they then require university educated people (or certified or etc.) to present broadly accepted established scientific claims? Will those claims be restricted to their relevant field (that seems reasonable, but impossible to police) or is anyone with a university degree allowed to comment? What about people with university degrees, but politically inconvenient opinions about, say, Covid? We’re not very far out from a Chinese government that advocated for TCM and Barefoot Doctors, so while it’s good the government is working to combat medical disinformation, they also have been historically a source for some of the most damaging misinformation that’s still extant in chinese society today.
It’s fine to cheer this decision on the face, but dunking on youtubers is easy and by association dismisses the very credible concerns people are raising over this policy.
I don’t think it’s a fundamentally bad idea by any stretch, but if it were implemented here in the US it would be instantly abused to dictate the political narrative.
I don’t get this logic of “yeah it’s a good idea but if we do it we’ll do it wrong.” Like okay… Then do it right then?
It’s like when someone advocates for higher taxes on the rich and someone responds with “yeah that’s great and all but the rich will just find loopholes” like okay. Then close the loopholes as well.
I do not think the concept itself is bad (verifying credentials for people presenting information on social media), and something like it could theoretically be implemented in the US. This system specifically though, as it appears to be being implemented by china, would be utterly unworkable in the US. There’s absolutely no infrastructure in place to allow for that sort of broad centralized verification, and constructing some centralized system for credential verification across all US states would be an absolute field day for identity theft.
It’s currently unclear how China anticipates handling that requirement too, FWIW. As far as I can find, that centralized resource also does not exist for chinese credentials (possibly one exists for degrees from major universities, but since this is not restricted to just university degrees, it’s still an open-ended question). I’ve got no idea how they plan on verifying claims, and I suspect neither do any major service providers in China right now.
Make it illegal and prosecute those that wind up with an audience. You can’t stop everyone giving out bad advice but you can prevent people making it their career and building a large following.
The issues that instantly come to mind: That’s fundementally unconstitutional, there is no mechanism for enforcement, there is no agency tasked with that and US LEAs are already beyond the workload they could ever hope to address, very rarely is “more cops” a solution, how do you address people that say things like “wink wink this is not medical advice”. This is simply not a problem that can be solved in a single paragraph response. It could possibly be done, but it would be spectacularly non-trivial to implement, even if we were in an environment where giving that kind of authority to fhe current administration seemed like a good idea.
Why’s it unconsititutional? Freedom of speech doesn’t mean you can say whatever you want.
And there’s no agency for it? Then make one.
The exceptions to freedom of speech are extremely specific, aren’t trivially described and have not been expanded in more than a century. You can’t simply dismiss that constraint because things like libel and active incitement are conditionally established exceptions. This would, under current laws, inarguably be unconstitutional - perhaps an amendment could be passed, but the best route for this would be through the extant libel laws and the civil court.
And there’s no agency for it? Then make one.
Sure, more cops is clearly a great solution! But that’s not what China is doing, which was the initial premise.
This is funny because the US anti-intellectual MAGA movement is doing the exact opposite. People with degrees who know what the fuck they are doing are being shunned and idiots with feels are being rewarded.
There are plenty of dumb as doornails graduates as well so …
MBA’s and nursing degrees come to mind. Is there a group as educated and just as likely to fall for a MLM scam?
Are there plenty of dumb as door nails graduates with millions of followers on social media though? Because this is what this legislation is supposed to target. Basically if Trump was in “Chyna”, he’d be in jail already for spewing nonsense non-stop on stuff that he knows nothing about, because he’s not actually educated on it.
yes lol, look at any conservative influencer on American tv. they all have degrees.
i don’t think this law would actualy change much here in the states. almost every dangerous spreader of misinfo i can think of did in fact graduate college in some way.
i can’t possibly see this law s anything but a tool to control online speech rather than a tool to fight disinformation.
if the goal of to reduce disinformation then this law will be ineffective.
They have to have a degree on the relevant topic. I assume most of those influences have business degrees or whatever that wouldn’t qualify them to speak on the dangers of vaccines.
There’s no shortage of bad faith influencers who have degrees and misinform anyway. Such laws shouldn’t be centered on pressuring people into expensive educational programs. They should focus on outlawing claims that are demonstrably false and harmful.
Does a degree cost anything in China other than time and effort?
deleted by creator
But should trustworthiness default to popularity?
deleted by creator
Not the question
deleted by creator
Those damn Commie bastards!
Hey! That’s actually not a bad idea. Can we do that in our government, as well as dopey influencers? Start with PeeWee Mengele.
America has a guy in charge of the health department that says a bunch of wack shit. It’s not just influencers but people with positions of power.
That’s who I was referring to as PeeWee Mengele.
