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.
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.
That “high trust” is only because the government hides a lot of information from them where in a free country it would be discussed in public. The government heavily controls what information is available, what topics can be discussed and what opinions are allowed.
Its not because they govern responsibly and earnt the admiration of the general public.like you seem to suggest.
You are half right and half wrong.
The Government controls all media. There are no major independent news organisations in China. Therefore, they won’t allow negative press about it to spread.
Because the news and social media only ever have good or at worst neutral news about the Government, never critical news, the result is that people think the Government does a good job governing.
At the same time, the poverty alleviation and anti-corruption efforts of the CCP have indeed brought millions out of poverty (even though that poverty is largely a result of bad leadership decisions by the same CCP in the past) and eliminated most forms of petty corruption. That is something that the Government makes sure everyone knows about and is always talking about. And to their credit, it isn’t wrong.
I do not and will not suggest that popular support for the Government would be anywhere near what it is now if it weren’t for the Government’s propaganda efforts and the suppression of speech, dissent, and criticism.
Absolutely.
The only fair way to handle it is to pay lip service to the free flow of information, and then get your friends who own every mass media platform with reach to push your own agenda, burying the rest in lawsuit threats and filtering algorithms.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m not defending the Chinese government as saints, but I think at this point we can safely acknowledge EVERYTHING sucks. If there’s a country fairly managing to promote truth while keeping dangerous nonsense from propagating, I sure haven’t found it.
How does a post where you make a bunch of uneducated guesses about a country get only up votes? Oh right, china bad, got it.
If only China would live up to the shining standard of the USA…
One country is spiraling into civil war while the other is the fastest growing economy in the world, and yet its the suicidal countries citizens constantly talking shit about the rest of the world.
China is not a third world country. They aren’t oppressed people. America is both of those things.
Well I’d watch out from posting anything like this unless you have a degree in Political Science from an approved institution. You might accidentally influence me and get fined!
Ah fuck! Does minoring in animal biology count?
I’ll still take the USA over CCP run China, because over half of the US voting population is against the MAGA insanity. When the mainland Chinese vote for Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party, then we’ll talk.
Most americans dont even know Chinese people vote for politicians, they think they are just told what to do all times of the day.
I’m conflicted. On one hand, I’m American and believe in free speech. On the other hand, I want assholes to be held accountable for lying.
So conflicted.
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.
Go with free speech. People usually get what they deserve, one way or another.
Usually due to laws rules and regulations holding their words/actions to account…
Not really.
Can we skip to the part where Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Farage, Wilders, Musk, Le Pen, the ICE agent that lives down the street, Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, etc etc etc get what they deserve please?
It doesn’t seem to have happened yet.
Skip it? It might not be until eternity, but they will reap what they have sown.
What they deserve
Like heading the department of health and human services?
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.
America doesnt have free speech.
六四天安門事件
Sure. But you can say a lot more in the USA than you can China without risking a knock on the door from the authorities.
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.
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.
How long to learn Mandarin? 🤣🥹🤷🏼♂️
Heres your intro lesson: ma ma qui ma man, ma ma ma ma means “mother is riding a horse, when the horse is slow mother curses it.”
mama ma ma ma? means “Does mother scold the horse?”
Wo he ni muqin fashengguo xing guanxì means “I had sex with your mom.”
I might have missed some tone symbols here and there but you get the picture. Its an easy language to pick up, you should absolutely do it. A few words a day and you’re Jinze-de (golden). Not to be mistaken for Jin ze de (responsible)
Confused ape noises
owmybrain
They say it’s the hardest language to learn…
Oh, if only a solid metric for reliable quality of life were eloquence, much less basic fluency, eh? 🫠
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?
Curious to see if this leads to licenses or degrees being revoked as universities have their name tied to what people are saying.
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But should trustworthiness default to popularity?
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Not the question
The idea is great on paper, but execution is everything.
It’s China. I’m sure there will be executions.
While I am pretty skeptical of US-style polemics on free speech, I of course support free expression, strong journalistic culture, limiting the influence of oligarch propaganda and significant safeguards to censorship.
That being said there are clear externalities to easy access to digital content distribution platforms that prioritize engagement above all else and do not bear responsibility for their actions.
I of course would never trust the CCP on this, but I think in the long term the externalities inherent to social media distribution will have to be accounted for.
