Legislation Against Fake News: is the solution worse than the problem?

fake news is not new we all know this
fake news has been around since the dawn of the printing press perhaps before fake news has been around since the town crier fake news has been around since the boy who cried wolf what we're living through is an era when people as never before are motivated to engage in this this discourse because they feel implicated in fake news the division between you know the journalists and the the audience has been broken down people today may feel a sense of participating in the the editorial role they're morally implicated in fake news even if it's just that you do your small part you as as a viewer you as a reader you post a story to your own Facebook Timeline you post a story to your own Twitter or other social media and then your own relatives your own friends judge you maybe they send you a bunch of angry emails or somebody saying hey why did you post this story don't you know that's fake news you know you post a link to a YouTube video when you only later find out that that particular YouTube channel is associated with some kind of political extremism or some kind of misinformation campaign and you hear back maybe from the people who love you and care about you the most and maybe from complete strangers um even if it's just in this small way of sharing length and seeing the consequences or buying into a story and then later finding out where its mix of half-truths came from we as never before in the audience maybe feel emotionally implicated if not morally implicated in the production and dissemination of news the implicit question that underlies all this is would the solution be worse than the problem and this question has a very different kind of moral tone if we're directing the question towards Facebook Corporation if we're directing it towards Twitter Google YouTube if we're talking about private companies taking the authority taking the responsibility selves to solve the problem or if we're talking about the public sector for mo government doable legislation let me tell you this is not a problem that's impossible to solve it's entirely possible for governments to legislate a requirement for journalists to do fact checking and for them to legislate real legal consequences if the journalists fail to go through the proper procedure and do that fact-checking but could the solution be worse than the problem I see this mostly discussed in a very hypothetical and philosophical sense and you know it's a philosophically deep problem but in this video we're going to look at a real world example take them from Taiwan it's totally applicable to the modern Western world even if you know nothing about Taiwan you know nothing but Asia don't worry you don't need to to understand this video as a footnote Taiwan really is a democratic country it's much more democratic than Canada or the United Kingdom they really do have a parliament they really do have assistant in some ways imitates in some ways emulates in some ways surpasses the European models that they had set before them for imitation they also learned from the experience of being briefly colonized by Japan and then rejecting the colonial Japanese tradition so they've had a mix of Western and Eastern influences starting up on the shallow surface of this story let me warn you it gets deep quick and there were interesting little contradictions throughout when I consulted different contrasting versions of the story that remind me even in a story that is itself about fake news a story that is itself illustrating the difficulty of having an enforcing legislation that requires factual accuracy journalistic verification in fact checking it's very difficult to accept anything that's being reported as a fact CTI TV means stream TV station here cgi TV was yesterday again find one million time $1 that's over 30 thousand US dollars by the National Communications Commission this time for failing to verify the information a pomelo farmer gave during a political talk show before airing it the news story was seen as the reason the Democratic Progressive Party won the legislative by-election in Tainan a traditional DPP stronghold by only a narrow margin okay so starting on the surface this is reporting a news talk-show a political talk show interviewed some pomelo farmers and that this interview had a decisive influence on the outcome of tightly contested elections the news source here CTI TV is owned by a company that's referred to here as want want and some of you may recognize the the brand name where you might recognize the logo that I've got here that the pictures they make snack foods that are exported around the world and there's definitely a prejudice against the newspapers and TV stations owned by this company there's definitely a feeling throughout Taiwan that somehow this is a crass for-profit corporation in the production of news in contrast to maybe the more scholarly and less less salacious news sources that are out there according to the Commission the hosts of CGI TVs political gossip program interviewed a pomelo farmer the farmer said that the price of pomelo was so low last year that 2 million tons of the fruit had to be dumped into the Sun one reservoir hmm other farmers standing near the interviewee said that they had not received the subsidies that they had applied for the host turned the statements from the interviewee into a quote unquote news report without first verifying the authenticity of the information with another source the Commission said so this is fake news this is where fake news can come from you can go out and you interview some pomelo farmers they may seem honest and simple and sophisticated but maybe those pomelo farmers have their own political agenda right maybe they're trying to shift the outcome of the election one way or another or maybe they're just grossly exaggerating because that's what they're inclined do and what's your role what's your responsibility as a journalist before going to press before broadcasting with this and can you be punished for failing to show due diligence failing to take those responsibilities seriously could it be maybe that the government feels this is a news source that's critical of the government and there may be enforcing the the legislation a little bit beyond what was intended in the letter and the spirit of the law to begin with was it really the intention of the legislators that the accuracy of a claim reported from some farmers in a sidewalk interview an interview on the streets a spontaneous comment like this was it really their intention that news reporters would have to take the time and check how many tons of fruit were dumped from the reservoir what actually happened maybe maybe so and would would the world be a better place if journalists answered to a higher standard of fact-checking of active research and informed opinion it's like to say around here CGI TV had only issued a correction about the subsidies and did not correct the dumping statement the Commission said adding that this has severely disrupted the agricultural market so you can imagine there are things here I'd like to fact-check too so I mean in the first example we're being presented with here there's a claim that this spontaneous interview had a direct impact on election outcomes and I doubt that I'd ask the question okay so when writing this news story now did you fact check that it's easy to say almost anything was a decisive influence over who won and who lost well can you can you verify that in the same sense that the government is here saying the journalists have to verify these phat claims can anyone verify the idea that this particular interview with some farmers really had a direct impact on the outcome of that election I think that would be very hard to verify it may not be a matter of fact at all right what about the the second claim at the end of the quotation that there was a severe disruption caused the agriculture secretary yeah well allegedly allegedly can you measure that can you give me a figure can you show me that really these comments about what happened with farming and farm subsidies and the price of pomelos that it caused and not not that the events caused it but that they're reporting the inaccurate reporting the fake news caused severe disruption air culture maybe you can but I'm skeptical and this is how we get into a kind of infinite regress we get into a loop of questioning well what frequently is adequately fact-checked the author of this article in the Taipei Times does something interesting here I think the author has intentionally made the second example contrasted to the first as absurd as possible to make the enforcement of this law seem ridiculous so meanwhile CTI TV news broadcast the story on March 12th about the proposal to raise pandas in gaussians Zoo in which the reporter compared pandas with Formosan black bears and concluded that the former were cuter than the latter the Commission said quote the news report could mislead the public about the right way to preserve and protect wildlife okay now I've got to call them out Taipei Times this is fake news about fake news even in raising this issue of journalism integrity journalistic integrity and fact-checking I went ahead and check the facts that that seemed a little suspect to me the same way I'm saying you I don't really know if I believe some of these claims but you know the impact of the first story well the second story I looked it up a fact checked I saw several different sources most of them in Chinese not in English um the point of the report was not to debate whether panda were cuter or less cute than this other type of bear this journalist has gone another way to make this the enforcement of law seem seem absurd instead it was actually raising the question of how much money the government is wasting on pandas and whether or not panda tourism is really just a completely meaningless spectacle that doesn't benefit or educate people in any way even in the title it's asking the question raising pandas isn't this just burning money isn't this just a waste of money and then the next part of the the headline here is asking is this without any kind of educational benefit for the people who go to see the Panda so people go to see pandas just because they're cute does that mean the government should spend millions of dollars on pandas it's raising this kind of question so again I've got to call fake news on how this story was reported the journalist I can see what their motivation is but what if we apply these same standards I mean again so if the government is gonna take away your freedom of speech is gonna take away your right to make a somewhat snarky report about you know the monetary and educational value of having a panda in the zoo because quote the news report could mislead the public about the right way to preserve and protect wildlife well hey that's your opinion I understand I understand but what about the journalists in their opinion what about the viewers know them what if that's actually a really important question ask and what if this isn't something we can in a simple sense challenge or debunk with the concept of fact-checking or factual accuracy so we got fake news on fake news about the question of fake news and then ultimately is there gonna be a legislative authority that ends this dispute so for those you can read Chinese I've got on screen here I tried to excerpt for you the relevant part of the law and here it is thanks to Google Translate and English programs shall respect multiculturalism safeguard human dignity and fulfill social responsibilities broadcasting news and comments should pay attention to the principle of fact-finding and fairness now Taiwan is a liberal parliamentary western-style democracy this is not nearly as authoritarian a country as Communist China it's also not even as authoritarian as Japan and yet you can see in the broadness of the mandate this gives the government to censor and encourage certain kinds of activities it's a little bit terrifying does each and every news report have to live up to this standard of respecting multiculturalism safeguarding human dignity and fulfilling social responsibilities what if someone wants to make a slightly snarky and snide news report insinuating that pandas are a waste of taxpayers dollars that the news report is I watched it I'd say that it insinuates that point it doesn't really come to some kind of resounding conclusion about it but it's inviting the viewer to reconsider why it is people think that pandas are worth the kind of infinite budget this way and to reconsider what is the meaning of of just taking your kids to look at something cute just because it's cute I mean that doesn't really have educational value so and so forth so I think it's a meaningful question to to raise but sure it's a little bit snarky it's not really living up to these this idea of I don't know well fact-finding and fairness is it in fact even a matter is it a matter of fact that's being disputed here at all so we come down to this question ultimately do you have the freedom to suggest the pivots are a waste of money or not um we live in an era when fewer and fewer journalists are in any sense professionals I am myself regularly horrified by the low level of erudition the low level of expertise the low level of insight analysis and research that goes into news broadcasting at even the highest levels I'm also horrified by what a large percentage of what passes for news is naked ly again for one faction or another again even in somewhat elite publications from my perspective foreign policy has gotta be the worst foreign policy magazine seems like everything I read there is just propaganda we live in an era when there are small well-funded organized interests that can pay to have stories told their way and then there's a huge disorganized morass of the general public who have the power to complain but who rarely have the resources or the self-discipline to engage in active research and to present informed opinion the public in general can complain but can rarely put together a convincing case to support one course of action or another and by and large what we see is that the people who now make the news for a living put less time less energy and less inspiration into the news they make then sincere hobbyists amateurs people who just get interested in a subject as volunteers and start looking into it does anyone today really feel intimidated by the caliber of news they see on CNN Fox News even the BBC even new services that receive textures might does anyone really feel when they see a news report let's say about Libya current events in Libya Afghanistan Iraq does anyone really feel after watching such a thing that they couldn't do better you couldn't do better in a few days or a few weeks if you did a little bit of the research yourself the news it's lost its sense of authority in that we in the audience now look at the naked effect of its mirror authorship and we know that most of the time we're looking at something produced on a schedule where just one or two people had just one or two hours to put together a new story from one or two sources how will the news media adapt well on the one hand we've see how it adapts to changing economic pressures and there's a really open really meaningful question of whether or not it should now have to change in response to legislated pressures also at what point will people start to question the consequence of its sure even things like public health consequences of having misinformation broadcast in a massive scale when misinformation makes the leap from social media to mainstream media or when just the sloppy poor quality of mainstream media coverage has terrible consequences in the real world I think that more and more countries will adopt laws just like Taiwan and I think that like the law here in Taiwan they're very likely to legislate in terms of method to say require that a journalist contrast four different factual sources in order to verify the facts so that there's a formal legally required process that to go through before broadcasting it's certainly easier to legislate a procedural requirement of that kind it's easier to do that than is to legislate a difference between truth and fiction or a difference between having social responsibility or a reckless lack of social responsibility ultimately the role of the news media the role of political analysis is not even educational in some cases it may be destructive devastating horrifying it may be meant to destroy the reputations and lives of some people that are being criticized to be blunt not all news is good news some news is bad and it doesn't seem to me possible to take the legislation that I've just read to you here in Taiwan and to apply to any of those real-world situations as you've seen it's not even possible in Taiwan with this very mild regime of censorship it's not even possible to make some snarky comments about pandas at the zoo being a waste of our money [Music]