A Jury of Random People Can Do Wonders For Facebook (theatlantic.com) 90
Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of Harvard's Berkman Klein Center, writes about how and why Facebook might take inspiration from the U.S. jury system in reviewing the truth value of political ads. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the article: What we need are ways for decisions about content to be made, as they inevitably must be when platforms rank and recommend content for us to see; for those decisions yet not to be too far-reaching or stiflingly consistent, so there is play in the joints; and for the deep stakes of those decisions to be matched by the gravity and reflectiveness of the process to make them. Facebook recently announced plans for an "independent oversight board," a tribunal that would render the company's final judgment on whether a disputed posting should be taken down. But far more than its own version of the Supreme Court, Facebook needs a way to tap into the everyday common sense of regular people. Even Facebook does not trust Facebook to decide unilaterally which ads are false and misleading. So if the ads are to be weighed at all, someone else has to render judgment.
In the court system, legislators write laws, and lawyers argue cases, but juries of ordinary people are typically the finders of fact and judges of what counts as "reasonable" behavior. This is less because a group of people plucked from the phone book is the best way to ascertain truth -- after all, we don't use that kind of group for any other fact-finding. Rather, it's because, when done honorably, with duties taken seriously, deliberation by juries lends legitimacy and credibility to the machinations of the legal system.
In the court system, legislators write laws, and lawyers argue cases, but juries of ordinary people are typically the finders of fact and judges of what counts as "reasonable" behavior. This is less because a group of people plucked from the phone book is the best way to ascertain truth -- after all, we don't use that kind of group for any other fact-finding. Rather, it's because, when done honorably, with duties taken seriously, deliberation by juries lends legitimacy and credibility to the machinations of the legal system.
Truth is simple, lies are complex (Score:2, Interesting)
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What's needed is not just to remind people of the lies, since people tend to believe what they heard first, especially (and hyper-hard in the case of conservatives who do not value facts or truth as much as they value tribalist identity) if it matches their existing biases. There IS a real need for preventative maintenance in society, to crack down on false advertisement and lying propaganda.
The
Re:Truth is simple, lies are complex (Score:5, Insightful)
"(and hyper-hard in the case of conservatives who do not value facts or truth as much as they value tribalist identity)"
The fact that you are only pointing out conservatives here when this is a problem everyone has pretty much shows you are exactly what you accuse others of being.
If people are rejecting your preferred news sites do you think it might be cause they feel that they cannot trust them?
I read everyone's news because no one is without bias. And it is my opinion that anyone bitching about the bias in news is a moron that should be busy minding their own because they lack the intellectual capacity to be productive for others when it comes to disseminating truth!
When people bitch about having just stepped in shit... they are talking about having just experienced a person like you.
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Lol... you consider that gaslighting?
It looks to me like you already doubt your sanity... excuse me while I sit back and grab the pop-corn.
I happen to believe you are in full command of your mental faculties.
I also happen to believe they are, shall we say... less then impressive.
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"(and hyper-hard in the case of conservatives who do not value facts or truth as much as they value tribalist identity)"
The fact that you are only pointing out conservatives here when this is a problem everyone has pretty much shows you are exactly what you accuse others of being.
Actually, this tribalist nature is pretty much a defining characteristic of most conservative authoritarians and being authoritarians is pretty much a defining characteristic of conservatives. There are no "left wing authoritarians". That does not really work. There are some that would qualify, but they do not really get followers in any significant numbers. Authoritarians are almost exclusively right-wing and they intentionally disregard truth whenever it collides with their tribalism. Yes, that means cons
China. The Soviet Union. Cuba. Venezuela (Score:3)
> There are no "left wing authoritarians". That does not really work. There are some that would qualify, but they do not really get followers in any significant numbers.
Leftist economics requires that people act opposite their instincts, that they not try to take care of themselves and their families. Therefore it requires constant force by an authoritarian government. Witness China, the Soviet Union, Venezuela - anywhere leftist economic policy had ever been in place.
"but they do not really get follow
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You mistake Socialism and Communism for "not conservative". A common issue with the politically non-enlightened.
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Ah, so we have a no true scottsman here?
Or perhaps you're using a non-standard definition for "conservative" here? Perhaps, if you examine your definition, you'll get that "conservative" by your definition is more "stuff I don't agree with or is bad".
Under all conventional modes of thought, socialism and communism are extremely liberal philosophies.
As such, yes, there are LOTS of authoritarian left-wing people. Everybody who wants the government to intercede to save the earth? Authoritarians. I've seen
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Socialism trending toward communism is a defining characteristics of left-wing ideology. Whether or not you LIKE communism is up to you, it's the definition of leftist.
And of course every communist country is extremely authoritarian because the definition of communism is that the government controls your money. You have to use force to get people to hand over all their stuff, and to make them work hard when their is no financial incentive to do so.
If you like the idea that you can move up and do well by wo
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You are virtue-signalling so hard, it is pretty staggering your head does not explode from cognitive dissonance...
That you add a bunch of lies is not surprising.
FYI: There is no large-scale "real" socialism or communism, you should not believe the propaganda these states put out.
Face it: You are part of the problem. Unless and until you (and others like you) get there, things will continue to get worse.
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> You are virtue-signalling so hard, it is pretty staggering your head does not explode from cognitive dissonance...
That you add a bunch of lies is not surprising
So os the sudden puking of ad hominem because thinking avout the idea of making something for your neighbor scared the shit out of you when you realized you're probably a capitalist, or is there some other reason you're scared shitless now and can't talk about the issues?
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Sorry, you seem to have conflated "authoritarian right-wing dictatorships" with left-wing? Maybe you are uneducated about political scales and theory?
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Tell you what, why don't you tell me what you think left-wing economics is. You think communism and socialism is right-wing?
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>being authoritarians is pretty much a defining characteristic of conservatives.
Yeah, those authoritarian NRA supporters who are arming up because they fear a fascist takeover. Definitely authoritarians.
>There are no "left wing authoritarians"
Of course there are. Just look at the politically correct extremists touting gender studies as a non-theistic religion. Don't agree with them in exactly the way they proscribe, and you're every nasty word in the book. You even get cases where they call trans pe
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I read everyone's news because no one is without bias
But this in of itself is also a problem. Everyone includes the domain of those who tell you truth and those who tell you falsehoods. If you are including false information within your data set it will skew the overall information. Perhaps you mean you read both political sides of information? Bias isn't falsehood and it's really important to remember that the two things are different axes. Something is true if it is a generally accepted outcome of a situation. If we're sticking to correspondence theor
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That's why you need to remind people of the lies, otherwise they forget, and since the truth is the most simple answer, it will win.
Actually, that is not true at all. Things people remember and believe they understand (usually falsely) are simple. Hence any good demagogue will push simple statements, never complex ones. "Mexicans/Arabs/[some other people] are raping out daughters." "Drugs are bad." "We are the greatest country on the planet." "A wall will keep us safe." "The others are the bad guys." and so on. None of these are true in this absolute form and many are outright lies. Yet they are all simple and all of these get used time
Re: Truth is simple, lies are complex (Score:2)
Re:what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yup, it sure is.
Ideas like this, though well meaning and great sounding up front are not workable in practice.
How do you pick the juries and make sure you have a unbiased mix? How do you do this and create a system with enough bandwidth to screen the necessary materials? How do you decide what's a political ad and what's not? I see a whole bunch of slippery slopes here and ways the camel's nose gets into the tent.
Much better would be just to CLEARLY mark purchased ads with their source and verify said sources before you take their money and run them. And when I say identify, I mean more than verifying their E-mail address and PayPal account, I mean verify they are who they claim, that they have a mailing address within the jurisdiction they claim and actually answer the phone number they give. Then, allow users to decide if they trust said source or not and if you are nice, give them the ability to choose what ad sources they don't want to see. In short, let folks "like" or "not-like" ads from specific sources.
Actually MOST Social and Political problems I see on the internet, SPAM, and such are all related to the "you don't know who I am!" mindset. We need to change that, start making it harder to be anonymous when doing business, buying ads, posting videos, sending E-mail and the like. I've noticed that nice folks in person take on this alter ego when they don't think folks know who it is and it's not a good thing. We need a way to require that such communications not be made anonymous. Political ads are just the start, a good start, but just a start.
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But that's how you end up with ads paid for by "Freedom for American Families and Apple Pie PAC". Technically, that would mee
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Conservatives love naming their political front groups in weird ways. They took Rule of Acquisition 239 to heart, "Never be afraid to mislabel a product."
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But that's how you end up with ads paid for by "Freedom for American Families and Apple Pie PAC". Conservatives love naming their political front groups in weird ways. They took Rule of Acquisition 239 to heart, "Never be afraid to mislabel a product."
I dare say that both sides of the isle are guilty of naming things to their political advantage. I'd not decry either side for this tactic, it's part of the game. All I want is to know the organization's name who's paying, that they are real and traceable. I should be able to look them up.
Besides, IF you are just believing anything some organization, trusted or not, posts on the internet, you are some special kind of stupid. IF you do this with an organization that you've not vetted but like because o
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Citizens United blew the lid off any sort of common sense laws regarding money in political media. Anonymity has been weaponized against us.
That's crap. Citizen's United merely moved the "big money" into PACs, it didn't change that big money was involved. Both sides of the isle have their PACs and deep pocketed donors supporting them. It did put large volumes of new money into the political system, but I'm not so sure this was a bad thing, given the implications of the 1st amendment in this country and the court's decision to equate money with speech (which seems very reasoned and logical to me.).
I know it's popular to blame Citizens United
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He says, and I bet there are some qualifiers coming...
Is that the only qualifier? Let's see...
Oh, some more. You realize that Citizens United opened to door to anonymous and dark money donations, right? But I wonder if you have any more qualifiers on t
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The only restriction on giving is no foreign sources. Campaigns and PACs can receive ANY amount from anybody who is a US citizen with money to give, companies included.
That's pretty much unlimited, no restrictions, no limits on individual donors or companies except that they be US based.
Everything else is reporting rules levied on the campaigns who receive and the FEC who publishes the reports.
My point is that the US citizens should be allowed to search and understand who's giving money to who and let th
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And my point is that as long as you allow unfettered corporate money in elections, you will never be "allowed to search and understand who's giving money to who and let the voters decide how that matters to them and their interests and vote accordingly."
Anonymity has been weaponized against us. This is all by design
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Thinking you can fix corruption by requiring attribution is forgetting just who is in charge of making laws requiring attribution.
This can be generalized to:
"Thinking you can fix corruption by passing laws is forgetting just who is in charge of making laws"
Should we have no such laws at all, then?
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That's not it at all.
I'm saying we cannot expect attribution and transparency in campaign contributions until we prohibit corporations from participating. Citizens United cannot be ameliorated. It has to be overturned with extreme prejudice.
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Then I'm not sure I follow. Why can't we expect attribution and transparency in campaign contributions, if we require those things by law?
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Your premise is bad. They will never be required by law as long as corporations can participate in elections.
We had a law, imperfect as it was, in McCain-Feingold. Look at the legal and logical acrobatics that were brought against that law via Citizens United, twisting the Constitution into a shape it was never meant to have. That's the first thing that has to be undone, then you can have "sensib
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Okay, but again, the same is true for overturning Citizens United. It has to be done by the Supreme Court - and who appoints the judges? Corporations that participate in elections, by proxy.
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That's why I'm pessimistic about anything changing without serious disruption.
Moderation systems: 25 years later (Score:3)
And 25 years later, Facebook learns how moderation systems work. The problem might be that selection bias on Facebook results in a very different subset of moderators than happens on a site like, say, Slashdot or SoylentNews or Kuro5hin.
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Re:Moderation systems: 25 years later (Score:5, Interesting)
This author also seems to leave out some very important critical pieces of the jury system in their argument, among them is that in actual court proceedings there's a judge there to rule on matters of law and to oversee the process to make sure that the jurors aren't presented with inadmissible testimony or other information that's not relevant to the matter at hand. Even then courts get it wrong enough that we recognize the need for a lengthy appeals process. Juries are also formed after going through a process where both sides get to remove potential jurors for just about any reason. Select people at random without any screening process and you're much less likely to get an impartial group.
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Yea, but the jury process has been corrupted for a long time. Concepts like Jury Nullification are very frowned upon by the inJustice system and many Lawyers are very skillful in manipulating the Jury during selection and trial. Judges are as crazy and insane as the entire process. There are lots of people in jail for having done nothing wrong like you said, but the appeals process is very discriminatory. Even after seeing so many innocents hurt by it all we do nothing to change any of it and we perpetu
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The lower the readership of Slashdot has fallen and the more the commentariat have become just an echo chamber o
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The lower the readership of Slashdot has fallen and the more the commentariat have become just an echo chamber of libertarian (non)thinkers, the more this has become true.
Why go out of your way to specifically call out one group or ideology and then insinuate that they're all wrong. You've immediately alienated anyone who might identify that way or eve
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I'm curious.. You mention Slasdot... What is your opinion of the moderation system here?
IMHO - It looks like the theory behind the Slashdot moderation system is fairly sound, it does seem to moderate up mainstream valuable posts and quickly lower the chaff for me. I usually don't filter what I see at all (I.E. I'm always seeing down to -1) so it's not as apparent to me sometimes. But I'm not really sure how they pick moderators. It looks like they pick from the list of folks who have recently been modde
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These days there are a TON of "slashdot orthodoxies" that if challenged, no matter how well phrased and well sourced the challenge, will result in a fairly fa
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So far I have read two of your posts, you bitch about tribalism while spewing your own triablist trash at the same time. Do you know what irony is?
You are clearly a hypocrite, what is wrong with you? Tribalism is just what people do, it does not matter if they are conservative, libertarian, liberal, or socialist. People group up because people that look, think, or act like them is a comfort... it's natural as prey running from predator. Everything that you said is a problem yes, but you are implying tha
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I stopped caring what you say about the time you called me "shit", so... shoo shoo, back to your parents' basement.
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"I stopped caring what you say about the time you called me "shit", so... shoo shoo, back to your parents' basement."
Sir or Madam, you wound me. It appears to be okay for you to disparage others but not for them to disparage you. Do you have a small mind or are delusions of grandeur your only respite from the constant onslaught of those more intelligent than you succeeding where you have failed?
I do not consider you an enemy. I just consider you a hypocritical moron and taking the time to point that out
Main difference (Score:2)
I'm curious.. You mention Slasdot... What is your opinion of the moderation system here?
/. is a different beast.
It's an older type of website, where everyone sees the exact same news: Title, Summary, and link-to-TFA-that-nobody-on-/.-reads-for-real.
So any article will attract people from the whole range of /. : actual people interested in commenting, troll, memes, the apple fanbois, the editor-bashing stalker-boys, the GNAA, the new-overlord greeters, that wannabe nazi with the twenty sock puppet accounts he uses to post svastikas, the mad-cow guy, the Tesla over-enthusiast clashing with the s
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The problem might be that selection bias on Facebook results in a very different subset of moderators than happens on...
a real-world jury. Because while you can get out of jury duty, it's nowhere near as easy as just ignoring a link or not clicking a button. (See the kid in FL who got 10 days in jail for sleeping through jury duty for an example.)
So what this guy is suggesting is not "a jury of random people" at all. Unless you lock your random people out of facebook until they moderate, it's not going to be random. It's going to be people who really want to influence the posts of others.
Influenced jury (Score:2)
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There are no rules preventing the jury from being influenced by anything. There might be rules that try, but they all fail and never succeed, the fact that a rule is necessary is part of that failure. Humans are very much a pile of little easy to influence blobs. Looking at politics should tell you right away that facts are not a big thing on most peoples list. Priority #1 is what is at the top of everyone's list. And Priority #1 is often counter productive to a persons own self interest. I watch peop
Juries aren't selected on merit (Score:4, Insightful)
In the court system, legislators write laws, and lawyers argue cases, but juries of ordinary people are typically the finders of fact and judges of what counts as "reasonable" behavior. This is less because a group of people plucked from the phone book is the best way to ascertain truth -- after all, we don't use that kind of group for any other fact-finding. Rather, it's because, when done honorably, with duties taken seriously, deliberation by juries lends legitimacy and credibility to the machinations of the legal system.
Lawyers pick the jurors they think will be the easiest to persuade, not the ones they think are best capable of discerning the facts or the truth. Why would lawyers want to make their jobs harder?
Also, legitimacy and credibility are subjective. That's how you get things like show trials, government hearings or questioning that is really nothing more than posturing and pontification than "fact-finding". That's how you had all white juries in the 60s convicting young black men in the South. All of these things hid(or hide) behind a veneer of legitimacy, but they are all farces with preordained outcomes.
The evolution of modern American politics has shown that the average American is unable, or unwilling, to determine truth from fiction when it comes to political discourse. The only way to fix it is to eliminate it to the furthest extent possible. No PACs. Limit personal campaign contributions. Have most federal election funding come from a federal source, and require all federal candidates to use that source. This would cut down on both false political advertising and attack ads because, with limited funds, campaigns would have to prioritize getting their message out.
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Guessing this is a US thing? I did jury service here in the UK (at the Old Bailey, so not some tinpot court in the country) and there was no opportunity for the jurors to be picked. They were a random selection.
Worth noting that Slashdot selects moderators by random and with no thought to their abilities to underst
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Guessing this is a US thing? I did jury service here in the UK (at the Old Bailey, so not some tinpot court in the country) and there was no opportunity for the jurors to be picked. They were a random selection.
In the US the jury pool is randomly selected among registered voters. The layers involved in jury selection for both parties in the case then selector exclude jurors from that pool based on certain criteria. Convictions have in the past been overturned due to irregularities in jury selection, such as excluding jurors based on race.
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Guessing this is a US thing? I did jury service here in the UK (at the Old Bailey, so not some tinpot court in the country) and there was no opportunity for the jurors to be picked. They were a random selection.
It is a misrepresentation of the way US juries are selected.
Jury selection is random (more or less drawing from the pool of registered voters.)
Attorneys can REJECT (a certain number of) jurors they feel would be biased against their case. Both sides are allowed to reject jurors.
This theoretically leaves a (random but fair) representative cross section of society to serve as jurors. It has it's flaws, but mostly it works.
Jury System (Score:1)
If Facebook is selecting the jury from their own users, an echo chamber already exists. Then does the person su
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I can't speak to how other states run their jury pools.
Who reviews your right to publish? (Score:1)
Their own words, links, art, cartoons, jokes?
In the USA people have the right to comment on politics.
Should "regular people" from the US gov, NATO, France, Germany, Communist China have the say on US speech? Some NGO, think tank? Cult?
"Regular people" who work for the gov of New Zealand?
On what they feel "reasonable" behaviour (UK spelling for their US "experts") should be in the USA on political art? A meme? A funny video? A m
So... not about truth and nothing is gained (Score:2)
"This is less because... the best way to ascertain truth"
Instead
"...lends legitimacy and credibility"
Just another *cough*bullshit*cough* attempt to create the appearance of truth, truthiness I think it was called.
What they need are consistent standards (Score:5, Interesting)
Time and again "fact check" sites tend to very quickly reveal their bias. Take Snopes for example. What used to be a favorite fact checking site quickly became a partisan joke once they got into politics. When they started 'fact checking' the Babylon Bee (a satire and spoof site like the Onion) you knew they had jumped the shark. The result is no different than the NY Times or Washington Post. If your liberal you accept their results, if your conservative you dismiss their results for their known liberal bias. People who are liberal likewise will reject conservative sites for what they see as conservative bias. Unfortunately most fact checking website are worthless for the public at large as they are seen as partisan echo chambers.
Pick your fact check site and you can pretty quickly find any number of examples of 'facts' that they got wrong. Here's just one set of examples, you can readily find many others with a little bit of searching. https://www.investors.com/poli... [investors.com]
As memory serves Facebook's original foray into fact checking were questionable at best: https://www.cjr.org/the_media_... [cjr.org]
In order for the public at large to have faith in fact checking results Facebook needs to:
* Employ fact checkers in proportionate numbers for liberal, independents and conservatives
* Hold their fact checkers responsible
* Acknowledge when they get it wrong
* Quickly update their fact checking results when they get it wrong
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That's exactly the wrong way to do it.
Facts are not beholden to political views. Facts are knowledge which satisfy a given evidentiary threshold. If you can show sufficient evidence then it's a fact. Often a citation to a reputable (read: non-partisan) source is enough.
What you need are non-partisan fact checkers. Pe
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Facts are not beholden to political views. Facts are knowledge which satisfy a given evidentiary threshold. If you can show sufficient evidence then it's a fact. Often a citation to a reputable (read: non-partisan) source is enough.
That is the ideal. But it is completely disconnected from the reality of the average person. Look at history and those writing about it. What is regarded as a historical fact and what not changes all the time and changes with whoever looks back. It is basically impossible to establish what a fact is even with hindsight!
What you need are non-partisan fact checkers. People who value facts and evidence above politics or supporting their own beliefs. Despite the marked decline lately, such people do still exist.
You need to find these fair-minded, not-beholden-to-ideology types and have them do fact checks. Sure, sometimes they'll disagree. There will be close or questionable calls. But most of the time, they'll do a far better job than other folks.
Again, this is the ideal. In theory, if you could identify these people, that would be a very good solution. But you cannot. It starts with the little problem that the independent thinkers (a
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Your hunting unicorns. It's easy to say that we're going to find a bunch of unbiased people to do our fact checking. I would imagine that all of the fact checking websites claim to have done exactly that. Unfortunately it's all a bit ivory tower and just doesn't work in the real world. That's how we ended up in the situation that we're in today where we have fact check websites that are dismissed today by large portions of society for their bias.
By way of example, it's a bit like when Supreme Court Chief Ju
Re:What they need are consistent standards (Score:4, Interesting)
It's easy to say that we're going to find a bunch of unbiased people to do our fact checking. I would imagine that all of the fact checking websites claim to have done exactly that.
That's exactly the wrong approach, and I would hope that none of the fact-checking websites make that claim, because no one who has seriously thought about the problem could possibly believe that it can work.
The right approach is to find a bunch of people who commit to demanding high standards of evidence, and to actively seek out disconfirming evidence -- for all claims but especially for the claims that agree with their own biases. The way to de-bias isn't to suppress bias, it's to identify bias and work specifically to counter it. This applies not only to political bias but also to all of the many cognitive biases that all of us have.
Better to acknowledge and own your bias. Once you have done that than you can take steps to mitigate the bias.
Completely agree.
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There cannot be "consistent standards". This is not a hard Science where you can distinguish truth and lies.
If it were, you would need to immediate discard anything religious (as obvious nonsense), anything with personal moral or ethical judgments (as subjective) and anything that has to do with fears or feelings (subjective again) and, yes, anything with political connotations (as matter of opinion, not of fact). People are irrational and so are their world-views. People also cannot distinguish between rum
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you would need to immediate discard anything religious (as obvious nonsense)
You can prove that religion is nonsense, of course? Because you just made an unqualified statement of fact on something that isn't, actually, falsifiable.
Actually, I'll save you the time: No, you can't. Religion is non-falsifiable, meaning you cannot disprove it. You have your own irrational personal prejudices and opinions on the matter, and they've blinded you - as you said, you cannot distinguish between "rumors, opinions, possibilities, and facts".
So, while you are making a mostly accurate point, yo
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Journalist Tim Pool is working on a fact-checking website that I'm hopeful will be better than all these other sites. Although Tim is firmly left-wing (worked as a fundraiser for GreenPeace), he's willing to critique misleading and false reporting on the left. I'm crossing my fingers that we'll be able to get a site that's not afraid to call out both sides, or to correct its mistakes.
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Sorry to break it to you Mr Rightwing Nutjob - but despite what Herr Goebbels and Faux News tells you, facts are independent of political position.
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Ah, good, so you'd agree that we can just use right-wing fact-checkers across the board for everything, as "facts are independent of political position"?
If not, then you've found an inconsistency in your position. Congratulations.
So, the /. model (Score:2)
So what we're basically saying here is that Facebook should consider following in the footsteps of Slashdot, with meta-moderation and such.
Huh. Does this mean we're going to see Facebook "Achievements" too?
Or (Score:1)
Maybe just let everyone decide for themselves?
The core problem is large-scale forced conformism! (Score:2)
All this is merely oil lamp optimization. ... oil lamps!")
("If only engineers would do research, we'd have perfectly working
You cannot expect millions or even billions to conform to the same set of rules, morals and standards. People differ. And they have the right to it. As long as their and your worlds do not interact, it does not matter how wrong and evil they find each other. Even an island full of people who all agreed that murder is OK have the right to murder each other on their island. Otherwise the
The public (Score:2)
It is remarkable to hear a voice from Harvard of all places expressing confidence in the voice of the general public.
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How dare the general public be allowed to think for themselves instead of having academia think for them!!!! Burn the witch!!!!
Would it include one person equittal? (Score:1)
You mean a group of easily manipulated fools? (Score:3)
Because that is pretty much what the average jury seems to be. Apparently general incompetence and not following current events are requirements to be on one.
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The choices are that, rule by would-be tyrants, or freedom of speech.
I'd prefer the latter in all cases, but if I had to choose an overlord, I'd choose a group of random people over politically appointed "fact-checkers" any day of the week.
You know what else could do wonders? (Score:2)
Shutting down Facebook.
Summary is not correct (Score:2)
but juries of ordinary people are typically the finders of fact and judges of what counts as "reasonable" behavior. This is less because a group of people plucked from the phone book is the best way to ascertain truth -- after all, we don't use that kind of group for any other fact-finding. Rather, it's because, when done honorably, with duties taken seriously, deliberation by juries lends legitimacy and credibility to the machinations of the legal system.
Wrong.
Decisions are left to juries, because the "powers du jour" are not to be trusted. The design was that elected representatives could write laws, and every system needs referees (the judges), but the ultimate control of how the government's near monopoly on force would be used should be left with "the people". The jury system is a direct check on the power of would-be tyrants. It is not about creating a narrative around the court process.
Ministry of Truth (Score:1)
Not a good pool of jurors ... (Score:1)
If they don't care about their own lives very well, they're not likely to care attentively to any issues that come up.
The only problem (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
who else do you recommend?
"What is truth" ... (Score:2)
In an era when I'd say 25% or more of the population either don't believe in absolute truth or don't believe it is possible to know what is true, how is it possible to expect people to judge what is an isn't true? I mean what business do you have imposing 'your truth' on someone else.
Of coarse the real problem is there IS only 1 truth, which is exactly equivalent to the set of facts with a value of true, regardless of human inability to establish scientifically the value of certain proposition as true of f