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.
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.
Man
Of all dystopias why is Deus Ex becoming true?
This has shades of a conversation you can have in that game’s Hong Kong where a bartender tells JC something to the effect of “China’s ‘repression’ has ironically preserved people’s ability to keep on like, LIVING. Whereas the United States with all its freedom was carved up and eaten by megacorps”
Whereas the United States with all its freedom
The United States is the country that leans on their supposed freedom the most in the world, but they are not the country with the actual highest freedom. And that’s even entertaining the rhetoric that absolute freedom is indeed desirable, which it most certainly is not.
I’m mostly just quoting a video game that was eerily predictive, is all.
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.
everyone loves censorship
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.
The idea is great on paper, but execution is everything.
It’s China. I’m sure there will be executions.
Is this really true? I cast suspicion because to me it sounds like they are trying to convince the world that whatever comes out of their influencers about the topics they are interested to push is of higher quality than the rest of the world.
Oh the media keeps reporting that there are human rights abuse going on some place remote. Those are obvious lies because our double MBA PhD influencer is quite clear that everyone is happy.
Yes it would be nice if only knowledgeable people spoke on complex subjects in a language that allows less knowledgeable people to understand. But one has to be able to trust what is being said.
I don’t think we’d lose anything of value even if we banned all influencers from speaking online on social media on any topic, so I can see why China’s done this.
seems like a way to silence dissident speak, or rhetoric, anything critical of the CCP.
That’s banned by default. They are targeting uneducated nonsense.
I get that you don’t want misinformation happening on certain topics. The scary part comes when you’re going to decide to police it. Can you still share info on the health journey of you or your loved one? Can you still ask people to buy your products that are meant to save more money in the long run than they cost? Can you tell people you had a bad experience with a certain bank? Not a fan of the approach, but I do understand the basic concept of why they’d want to do something.
Turkey requires a college degree to become president. Then they started revoking the college degrees of the opposition candidates.
Pro gamer move.
Personally I’d like to see a total global ban of social media.
Humans aren’t designed to communicate with this many people at once, and it shows.
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.
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.
