China Bans the Use Of Social Media As a News Source 96
Mark Wilson, reporting for BetaNews:Continuing its control of the internet, China has announced that news outlets may not use social media as a source of news -- at least not without official approval. The Cyberspace Administration of China says that the move is part of a campaign to prevent the spread of rumors and fake stories, but most people will see it as the government continuing to flex its online muscles. To add weight to its reasoning, the regulator referred to a number of fake news stories that had originated and spread online. It's an interesting new code of conduct, particularly considering the Chinese government floods social media with fake stories of its own.
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Re:Tell Me Again Why We Hate On China (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't think we hate on China. We worry about our Chinese brothers/sisters and hope someday things will get better for them.
Right. In all the nationalism and flag-waving that is often displayed on the 4th of July, it's important to remember the difference between a government and that nation's people.
One can despise the government of China while wanting the best for the people of China. It's the same way I feel about the USA. The US government is a cancer spreading out of control, but I bear no animosity towards American folk. They're the first victims of it.
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"it's important to remember the difference between a government and that nation's people."
I used to think that too, until Hillary and Trump became our Presidential choices. Now im convinced people get the government they deserve. There is no line between the people and the government, its an excuse, nothing more.
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Right. In all the nationalism and flag-waving that is often displayed on the 4th of July,
There's a difference between "I like my country" and "I want to conquer other countries." One of those is good, and one of those is problematic.
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You should look into creating an account if you actually care. Anon posts start lower in the first place and should bypass the metamod system. You can also adjust your threshold to view negative scored posts and your post starting scores can increase once you build karma. .
But if you cannot even log in, I have little sympathy.
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Yup. Non-anonymous posts from posters with decent karma (which you can get quite fast) start at +2. That means it takes more than just one moderator to remove them from view. Now, if you upset 3 moderators, you probably deserved it. I browse at -1 and it's a cesspool.
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The working class want to enjoy a comfortably, materialistic lifestyle on their limited resources, and so demand low-cost manufactured goods. The ruling class seeks to increase their wealth by selling to the working class at a margin. Both of these goals are served by importing from China.
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Censorship would mean I couldn't read your inane rambling at all, it just wouldn't be there. Moderation working as intended
Bring something worthwhile to the conversation of this extremely click-baity article
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Hiding posts from view of most users...
Viewers' choice! They can set the desired threshold. So you are wrong...
Re: Really quick China-style censorship (Score:5, Insightful)
It is censorship. Comments are being suppressed, which is a form of censorship. I won't pretend that all censorship is inherently bad, but it is taking place here. And it really is a problem.
If you post as an AC, it takes a single downmod to be at -1. It doesn't mean that your post is unacceptable to Slashdot, as a whole. Rather, one user disliked your post and was able to put it at -1. That means a lot of users will never see the post and the moderation, if unjust, may never be undone. Furthermore, editors have unlimited mod points and can moderate a single post many times. There's no way to tell how often a post has been moderated or who is doing it.
Moderation also affects your ability to post. If you're logged in and your karma gers low enough, you post at -1 but can only post twice a day. It also affects your ability to moderate. In other words, it greatly affects your ability to participate in the system.
If a single user can very quickly moderate a post to -1, it makes it pretty unlikely that many people will see the post. Also, while its justifiable to censor off-topic posts, flames, and comments with patently false information, a lot of comments also get modded down because they're disagreeable with the prevailing point of view.
The system isn't very good at highlighting good posts. It is, however, very effective at promoting groupthink and suppressing opposing points of view.
I have been moderating at Slashdot for years, and in that time, I have browsed countless 0 and -1 posts. Most of that is complete and utter crap. If you want to post on how evil black people are, if you want to spam every page with comments on "those republicans are evil", "she did it again", "obama wants to kill black people", then YES, you should go to -1, because that is absolute garbage that contributes absolutely nothing. Almost all of the good and insightful posts at 0 eventually wind up at score 5, even though it takes longer, which it should - if you're not willing to lend your words a reputation, then yeah, they have to get by purely on content, which will require you to appeal to whatever the kind of person who reads at 0 is in hopes that they mod you up. If you really want to lend substance to your posts, then you post with a name, because then you actually have some form of punishment for trolling. As to that, trolling itself on Slashdot is absolutely ridiculous these days; some asshole loser, with waaaaaaaaa too much time on her hands floods every story with complete garbage, and it's getting longer and longer. So yeah, it will get modded down, because nobody wants to see it; we can only hope at some point she realizes what a stupid and pointless endeavor it is.
Furthermore, the system of karma works exactly as it's supposed to. If you take up a side in a debate or whatever, you'll almost always get modded up by both sides if you can actually make decent and coherent points. When you write "stup4d obama he against allz de Trumpz", you are just as likely to get modded down as if you wrote s/obama/cruz. If you have been modded down so incredibly often that you have -1 and can only post twice a day, well, maybe you should rethink what you're writing. If 99.99% of people hate it, then just maybe there's something wrong with it - I find it hard to believe someone is so incredibly special that we all immediately, all 99.99% of us, vote down their posts because we're so dumb we don't see the enlightenment in the above. For example, if you flood the story with a bunch of stupid political posts that have absolutely no relation or bearing with the story.
Third, moderation never deletes a post, only hides it. If you are genuinely confident in what you've written, then obviously that's not a problem; you know that anyone who wants to here your side of the story can easily find it by searching at 0. If your genuine goal is to contribute something, then you're obviously focusing on writing good content and not on how high you ca
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But how will you vote on an anonymous post if you can't see it?
fake news stories? They've been reading the Onion (Score:2)
Oh well, maybe the Chinese people can just use social media for the news themselves, and bypass the middleman.
Eh, more censorship. Circumvention is all we need, not political grandstanding on its merits.
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Nothing another "Opium War" can't fix..
Cutting costs (Score:2)
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When was that time, exactly? The 19th century? That's the only era I can think of when China was weak enough to manipulate. American attempts to play Taiwan (ROC) against China sure didn't bear much fruit, even when we were using China's UNSC seat as leverage, nor did any form of diplomatic protest from the cultural revolution through Tananmen cause any change at all. In fact the only way the USA did manage to influence China
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The US has no power which seems to have been Obama's goal all along.
You still don't understand the way this works?
Obama may very well have been sincere about his intentions and his campaign promises when he first ran for president. When he actually got in, though, the first thing he learned was that the same monied powers who put him there can also bring him down. No one achieves president through personal merit. You achieve it by tremendous political, financial, and media support. There are strings attached to receiveing this support. It is not a free gift offered fro
Power Self-Justifies (Score:1)
The Chinese government likes it's own fake news, just not other people's. They are hardly unique in this respect; power always finds a way to justify it's own behaviour. But those other people, over there? Why that's fake news, terrible!
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The social media in China are full of pump-and-dump scams, scaremongering, way overblown claims, false accusations and paranoid trips into the realm of fantasy (last week I read through an article that was removed from github of all places, about how Xi Jinping had an illegitimate brother that he later had killed). And it creates a vicious feedback cycle when newspapers copy the rumours from the social media pages as news, which then gets recycled with more fanciful additions as "published in the newspapers
Finally a sensible and well thought out policy (Score:2)
When can the west follow suit? Speaking of, why do we even go to news sites anymore when all they do is post screenshots of someone's tweet?
Stand alone complex (Score:2)
When can the west follow suit? Speaking of, why do we even go to news sites anymore when all they do is post screenshots of someone's tweet?
I've often wondered whether someone could "prank" the news media or the police by posting a false twitter feed or video or something.
For example, we see police arresting people for video'ing themselves drunk driving. I wonder if someone could post a video of this, let the police arrest them, then show that it was done on a stage and show a video of the scene being taped. YouTube videos are not evidence by themselves.
Or another example, suppose someone ran a half-dozen twitter accounts with mundane posts gen
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I've often wondered whether someone could "prank" the news media or the police by posting a false twitter feed or video or something.
We see this all the time. News articles frequently run with false stories. My favourite was a youtube video of news coverage of a huge accident involving a plane crash on the road. They had the helicopter flying over providing film and they were commenting how the road was shutdown due to the incident. Then they started commenting about how they had little information but they at this point assume there was no injuries because a lot of people were standing around and no one seemed to be in any kind of distr
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Well, they have to do that, since "official" sources always have "no comment". Using social media is a way of bypassing them. It's a Good Thing®. This is what happens when you allow too much state secrecy. It's an example of *routing around the damage*, something where the internet itself needs improvement.
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No. Using social media as a source for further investigating is a good thing. Using social media itself leads to false garbage, misconstrued factors, or sometimes a news website entirely full or worthless opinion pieces, e.g. "People are calling for a #quexit [state of Queensland exiting Australia] after Pauline Hanson [basically Australian version of Trump except without money support or charisma] get's re-elected". Yeah this headline has been plastered all over multiple news papers not only in Australia b
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Social media is no worse than Hearst's or Murdoch's (as just two examples) yellow journalism, the kind that regularly gets us into wars on false pretenses. Social media has no monopoly on rumor mongering by a long shot. It's not like this stuff hasn't been done before [mentalfloss.com]. Old habits...
It's up to us to filter out the chaff to find the real story. You know what they say about eyewitness testimony... it's hardly reliable.
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There's tremendous pressure on the media to report on everything quickly. Breaking news. Fact-checking is an unacceptable delay.
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Something to hide eh? (Score:1)
Only reason any government would do this is if they have a lot to hide. I wonder when the lid of secrecy will be blown wide open (much like what happened to several shady organizations with the Panama papers). They can't hide their dirty secrets forever ;).