I generally don't respond to appeals and petitions and begs, unless I am already committed in some way to dealing with the issue at hand or need, or have a reason to support the group personally (beyond just being an intersectional disadvantaged group). Yet some people would see willingness of someone like me to "play ball" with the system as part of the whole picture of legitimate use of the principles behind the First Amendment.
Tuesday, August 27, 2019
Could tech require account holders to show good "social credit" some day? It relates to another question about journalism and licensing
Given all the wild controversies about journalism and
social media recently, I looked up to see what the scuttlebutt is right now on
whether journalists should be “licensed”.
As the video above indicates, David Pakman presented congressman
Jim Lucas (R-Ind) proposed in 2017, although his purpose was “rhetorical” – is a
“fundamental right” undermined if a license is required to exercise it? Driving a car is a privilege, after all. (The
second amendment isn’t worded quite the same way as the first – “Madison’s
Music”, below.)
Getting back to 2019, the main site I found was weighted about 75% “No”. Of course, you could have some international
body handle the licensing to avoid the politics of any government, but any body
at all will have a political bias and power structure to maintain. As we saw from the Covington Kids last January,
mainstream media, the “Fourth Estate” does rush to conclusions to get the ratings
and can get it wrong – and tends to have a bias toward the Left.
So independent sites and operations do act as an “immune
system” for the overall truth telling. It’s a sort of herd immunity,
vaccination thing.
Yet, it seems well to consider some sort of rating of
reporters, especially those who report new stories as is. In that regard, raw footage is normally the best
source of truth there is, although it needs to remain unedited and be complete
for an incident. That’s the philosophy, then, behind Ford Fischer’s News2Share.
Sites like Newsguard will rate well-known sites as to
objectivity and political bias.
Then the problem is paying for it. YouTube is finding that advertisers are uncomfortable
now with news on controversial events from independent sources, since they tend
to include more of the disturbing material.
Should an event like Christchurch be shown as it unfolds for “news
value”? Almost everyone in the tech and
political community says, no.
So there is a legitimate argument that knowing that
their protests will be livestreamed may be an incentive for some groups or
individuals to commit violent acts.
There is also the issue of commentary, and when news
reporting slips into opinion. My own style
is to combine the details from different sources, connect the dots, and point
out the possible consequences of events unfolding in combination.
When people call themselves journalists, when should they
condemn public officials? After all,
that’s opinion, right. Trump seems to be
the exception. (Howard Gardner, Aug 2016, Huffington Post).
If you want an example of undercover reporting as such,
look at Alex Zielinksi, Blogtown, with insights as to what really happened in Portland.
The experience of reaching the entire globe without a
gatekeeper is broader than journalism alone. Suddenly, around 1998 or so, as we
discovered the power of search engines, ordinary people had the capability to
speak and be heard by anybody. “Getting
published” was now less of a deal than it had been.
Viewed that way, it’s not impossible to imagine that
some social credit should go with the “privilege” that we hadn’t had before. Nobody thought about it that way during the days
of the Internet as the “wild west”.
And some on the Left believe that no one should be
allowed to articulate his own thoughts spontaneously, but should belong to a
group and be ready to serve that larger group’s purpose – solidarity. To allow otherwise is to allow better-off or
privileged individuals to use speech as power (that’s Marcuse’s idea).
In fact, there is a theory, at least suggested in a
book (“Madison’s Music”, by Burt Neuborne) that maintains that the First
Amendment (and entire Bill of Rights) is written in a sequence that should be
followed to maintain integrity. An
individual speaker should be willing to back up his speech with action within a
group, and petition. You can imagine where this could go – a world where tech
companies only allow self-publishing accounts for those with “good social
credit” which might encompass community engagement – even to the point of
proving you can raise money for other people’s causes first – and then your
speech is no longer just your own. We already see this with Facebook’s prompting
users to run fundraisers on their own accounts.
I generally don't respond to appeals and petitions and begs, unless I am already committed in some way to dealing with the issue at hand or need, or have a reason to support the group personally (beyond just being an intersectional disadvantaged group). Yet some people would see willingness of someone like me to "play ball" with the system as part of the whole picture of legitimate use of the principles behind the First Amendment.
I generally don't respond to appeals and petitions and begs, unless I am already committed in some way to dealing with the issue at hand or need, or have a reason to support the group personally (beyond just being an intersectional disadvantaged group). Yet some people would see willingness of someone like me to "play ball" with the system as part of the whole picture of legitimate use of the principles behind the First Amendment.
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