Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

I have interacted with several people on Facebook who rely on fake news sources.<p>I pointed out fake news articles several times on one person&#x27;s Facebook page. She agreed the articles were not true.<p>However, she added &quot;I don&#x27;t have time to figure out if they&#x27;re true. People can read your comments.&quot;<p>I asked her what she thought of the fact that this particular article, which was blatantly false, was shared 16,000 times.<p>Her response:<p>&quot;That&#x27;s comforting.&quot;<p>I was shocked.<p>And yet, that is the reality we now live in. Many, many people are acting, and thinking, exactly like her.

I quit Facebook 1 to 2 years ago. I suppose that&#x27;s one of the reasons I didn&#x27;t understand the hatred during the election towards the other side.<p>I don&#x27;t have a feed of &quot;He&#x27;s evil&quot; &quot;She&#x27;s evil&quot;. I saw two bad candidates and I understand where people are coming from with their votes.<p>I&#x27;d like to see most independents &#x2F; democratic people unite under a real progressive platform next election and stop the extremist cycle of social issues vs fear mongering.

Does Snowden really think that the canonical <i>man on the street</i> is here waiting to be advised on this topic?<p>The people who were influenced the most by fake news are those who probably don&#x27;t even feel there <i>exists</i> a fake news issue.

Facebook reminds me of a Dave Chappelle sketch, <i>If The Internet Was A Real Place</i> [1]. But instead of a world filled with porn stores and free CDs, Facebook World is where you have used car salesmen peddling ideology and breaking news, libraries filled with mirrors but no books, where humans lack filters for their compulsion to say something – like a Tourette&#x27;s syndrome for half formed thoughts. Where they’ll yell shit at you like “Your dog’s ears are wow!” and then finish with a racist tirade.<p>If you want anything positive: happiness, a sense of contentedness, intellectual enlightenment, more time - ditch it. The odd gem shows up there, but even garbage tips and sewers are home to a few wedding rings and gold wristwatches.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=91YpZe1SmNg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=91YpZe1SmNg</a>

Back in late August when I started my new job, my first purchase with my first paycheck was to get a subscription to Le Devoir, Montreal&#x27;s independent newspaper. It&#x27;s amazing how much more informed I feel now: because the content only changes every 24 hours, I have the opportunity to get to the less sexy stories, stories that would be buried on a fast moving website because they don&#x27;t generate clicks, but which still deal with important local issues.<p>I highly encourage people to research their local newspapers and support one: you get so much out of something that costs the equivalent of a couple Starbucks coffee pet month.

The real problem did not start with Facebook and other social media being fake. It was the main stream media that started to generate fake news with the support of their local governments. No one can explain better than [ <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chomsky.info&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chomsky.info&#x2F;</a> ].<p>The other issues is international, before this year US elections, US used these so called social media to &quot;export its kind&quot; of democracy to other part of the world, call it Arab Spring and rest of the events in middle east and recently in Turkey. It was perfectly legitimate to use them as under cover agents of democracy.<p>History has taught a lesson to American( sensible ones) who were closing their eyes&#x2F;or unawre of world events specially and how they affected the people around the glob using &quot;Democracy&quot; &quot;Freedom of speech&quot; &quot;human values&quot; while violating the exact same thing at the same time.<p>Their bigotry has revealed in a strange way, but its too late for lots of people, for Americans and for the rest of the World.<p>What are the alternatives:<p>a). Free media the ways it should be, main stream media is polarized itself already and dictated by high in the Govt. offices.<p>b). Accept that democracy does not work sometimes if its helping hands are already chopped off e.g participation of civil society, feed media etc ..<p>c). Do not spread democracy for the sake of democracy if its more evil than dictatorship.

The last 12 months I have visited Snopes more times than not in order to disprove some of the articles my Facebook friends choose to share.<p>It&#x27;s slightly alarming that people don&#x27;t think they need to fact check. You know it&#x27;s bad when the President-elect opens up about his internet fact checking[0].<p>It sets a dangerous precedent. There are less intelligent people in this world who read deeply into these &quot;articles&quot; and act on them. They choose to take it as fact because it&#x27;s a website. It&#x27;s scary.<p>What can we do? Upvotes&#x2F;downvotes? Won&#x27;t work at scale, because likes&#x2F;shares have a connotation of legitimacy.<p>Can we educate the public? We can try, but some people are so far from being able to (or willing to) learn. They&#x27;ll discard any help, citing propaganda, claiming &quot;xyz source&quot; is trying to influence their thinking; how dare they.<p>Can you tell this exhausts me?<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=l9IEIP3k_8c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=l9IEIP3k_8c</a>

I don&#x27;t want ANY news on my facebook.<p>I wish I could just filter all externally linked posts, posts with &gt; 200 shares or likes.<p>Facebook is pretty useless for me. I use messenger, because it&#x27;s ubiquitous, but other than that, it&#x27;s a hybrid of twitter and 9gag.

Fake news, hoaxes and scams existed long before Facebook. People just use Facebook more, things can spread faster, and all in all it amplifies an existing problem.<p>Email forwards (and in their newer reincarnation, at least in the Middle East, Whatsapp forwards) spread false news for as long as I remember using the internet. A part time job for me was to respond and debunk these emails when they landed in my inbox. I even put in the time to explain to people how to spot false information (e.g. if the email ends with &quot;forward this to x number of people or else&quot; is 100% a hoax or a scam).<p>Maybe Facebook -- as our times&#x27; Master Switch -- can fix this, and for the first time we&#x27;ll be happy with centralization.

This article is on a &quot;How to make money blogging&quot; website, not exactly a source I&#x27;d turn to for trustworthy anything let alone news about not relying on other news...<p>Anyway, here are some more legitimate sources for the same topic for anyone interested:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;11&#x2F;15&#x2F;snowden-discusses-facebooks-fake-news-controversy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;11&#x2F;15&#x2F;snowden-discusses-facebook...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.engadget.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;11&#x2F;15&#x2F;snowden-we-rely-too-much-on-facebook-for-news&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.engadget.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;11&#x2F;15&#x2F;snowden-we-rely-too-much...</a>

I have a lot of mixed feelings on this one. Of course one shouldn&#x27;t rely upon Facebook for the news, just as one shouldn&#x27;t rely upon Fox News. But people are going to <i>anyway.</i><p>The problem in this election was that Facebook did exactly what it was designed to do: show people more of what they wanted to see. Unfortunately that creates extreme echo chambers, where blatantly false news ricochets around the site, blindly liked by partisans on each side.<p>So that leaves open the question of what to do.<p>On the one hand, Facebook is a massive media company, and I am not comfortable handing them carte blanche to police and control the speech of their users. On the other, Facebook&#x27;s current policy of &quot;neutrality&quot; creates an environment that favors political isolation and the spread of outright falsehoods.<p>At the very least, it seems Facebook could do something about purveyors of those falsehoods algorithmically. But even then I have my misgivings about a private corporation, or really anyone, determining the acceptable range of public discourse.

This might not be possible. People who actually swapped feeds with someone who had a different viewpoint decided they did &quot;not like the news&quot; because it didn&#x27;t validate their very own viewpoint. So the problem isn&#x27;t how fact checked the news is but more on the voter&#x27;s views. That might be something very hard to change. [1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;2016&#x2F;nov&#x2F;16&#x2F;facebook-bias-bubble-us-election-conservative-liberal-news-feed" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;2016&#x2F;nov&#x2F;16&#x2F;facebook-bia...</a>

The problem is not the first mover advantage of Facebook, but that people do not understand logical fallacies, that they erroneously believe that most media is impartial, and that they are unaware of confirmation bias.<p>Logical fallacies should be taught in school: we also start with simple arithmetic before we move to more complex topics. (A course in formal logic seems overkill, it should be an applied course.)

The power Google and Facebook hold to censor and selectively control what people see and hear is terrifying: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;11&#x2F;15&#x2F;google-and-facebook-ban-fake-news-sites-from-their-advertising-networks&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;11&#x2F;15&#x2F;google-and-facebook-ban-fa...</a><p>In an important aspect, this is not any different han a library deciding to censor what information they make available. In the past this war has been waged before--As Google will ban news over quality of the information, librarians have banned books over the quality of the information. Once Tom Sawyer is banned, that sets a precedent to ban Catcher in the Rye, then Fahrenheit 451, then Animal Farm.<p>It&#x27;s a very slippery slope, and it&#x27;s absolutely terrifying to me.<p>I don&#x27;t want to live in a world where few have absolute power over the many. If someone can control what you hear and see, they can control what you think.<p>Is Trump&#x27;s election just a convenient excuse to seize this opportunity?<p>Thank you Snowden, I also am terrified by this.

I don&#x27;t see this as a new problem tbh. It&#x27;s a function of human nature. We like to think that we are smarter and better than our primitive ancestors but the fact is that we are exactly as dumb or as smart as they were. Only thing that separates us is our knowledge. But we are just as prone to bias, intellectual weakness, selfish dishonesty and irrationality than our dumb ancestors. Most people are followers, we want to be in a group, we want to belong, we want to be led and above else we want to feel good about ourselves. People believe what they want to believe because that is safe, comfortable and easy. The psychology is the same as religion, minus the supernatural. This election showed as much. We are perfectly willing to disregard facts and reason if it suits our narrow benefits or correlates with what we think we know already. It takes great strength of character to put principles and reason above personal comfort and safety and frankly most people lack it. Add to this modern identity politics and you have a recipe for disaster.<p>Our lives are easy. We think that we are advanced but this can all turn to shit in no time because our base natures are still very much intact. Consider the Nazis and the power of group think and in group bias. Completely normal people can be made quite easily to do savage things. Even in this post WW2 world, the Stanford prison experiment showed as much. We really are fragile beings and we have to be vigilant, now more than ever, because we are under the mistaken belief that we today are somehow better, more evolved or new. When it comes down to it then we are nothing but animals, driven by our instincts and all the science, culture and philosophy flies out the window. I think the Jedi and the Sith are a great metaphor for this. We need self control and vigilance to not fall to the dark side, which is often tempting and the path of least resistance and no matter hour high you have risen, you can always fall.

I can&#x27;t remember where I saw this quote last year but it rang terrifyingly true to me:<p>&quot;The people who used to tell me that Wikipedia is unreliable now get their news from viral facebook posts&quot;

Simple answer: don&#x27;t use social media.<p>I don&#x27;t understand why this is controversial. If you don&#x27;t approve of the way they do business, don&#x27;t use their products. I use no social media accounts and my life is plenty-full of engaging, useful discussion.

&gt; <i>[..] many people are criticizing social media outlets – namely Facebook – for not doing enough to weed out obviously fake news articles that could have potentially impacted people’s votes. This is a claim that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been quick to dismiss, [..]</i><p>I wish Facebook would remove their &quot;trending news&quot; feature. Their algorithm is basically selecting and promoting all the junk it can find, without the slightest vetting. How is it possible that a feature botched like this would: 1) pass the &quot;testing&quot; stage, 2) be ever considered a good idea in the first place.<p>And on top of that, they claim no responsibilities ? Lol.

The article says this: Snowden’s comments echoed those of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who said that it’s “extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other.”<p>But he&#x27;s NOT echoing Zuckerberg&#x27;s comments - either in spirit or intent. He&#x27;s pointing out a bigger problem inherent in relying on Facebook as a single source for news.

I can&#x27;t believe so many people actually use facebook. It&#x27;s a time suck, a voyeuristic and narcissistic view into people&#x27;s lives, a government database, etc...

Some time ago, Facebook was all about FarmVille. A fictional cow was sad and you had to help. Over and over again... in your profile, in your news feed, everywhere.<p>Facebook fixed that problem by moving all game activity to a specialized area.<p>So that&#x27;s the solution. Facebook needs to split links from user photos and updates. And move the trending pane to that area as well.

Well all this political talk gives me some ideas.<p>Is it possible, at this stage, for geographically large countries with very large populations to move forward in a coherent way?<p>All of the better places to live, as rated by purchasing power, health, education, what have you, are either geographically small and or have a small population.<p>China, India, Russia, Brazil, USA - all these big places with big pipulations rank poorly in some number of quality of life indicators.<p>Australia, Canada, New Zealand aren&#x27;t without their problems but seem to suffer a less severe case of the issues. And then there&#x27;s those Scandinavian countries which rate highly.<p>Why this pattern?

So, some actual data on how many US adults get news from various sources:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.journalism.org&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;26&#x2F;news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.journalism.org&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;26&#x2F;news-use-across-social-...</a><p>38% Never, 18% hardly ever, 26% sometimes, 18% often.<p>Note that none of this excludes people getting news from non-social sources such as going directly to whatever news sites they like.<p>It&#x27;s not clear that this is really much more of an issue than hearing what Bob in marketing thinks of issue X, Y or Z.

&gt; Facebook itself is addressing the controversy by announcing they plan to ban fake news outlets from their ad network, cutting off the revenue source for these sites.<p>It&#x27;s funny that the linked article[0], presumably from a &quot;real&quot; news source, very clearly says that Facebook&#x27;s action will have basically no effect on the issue.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;la-fi-facebook-fake-news-20161115-story.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;la-fi-facebook-fake-news-201...</a>

Minus regulation or financial disincentive, Facebook is incentivized to push crap at you that you like.<p>They clearly make a mint off of this stuff, so good luck affecting change.

One thing&#x27;s for certain: Facebook AI research is running deep-layered natural-language ANNs right now on a year of election comments and likes. I think well before four years they&#x27;ll know exactly how to detect bubbles of alternate political reality and also how to break them up. There will be some interesting decisions facing them before the next election.

I know it might be an unpopular comment, but I feel like we should just rely less on Facebook in general.

I &#x27;quit&#x27; Facebook two years ago. I occasionally log back in to see what people are getting out of it- and my outsider observation is that Facebook unintentionally feeds people with borderline personality disorder.<p>(<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mayoclinic.org&#x2F;diseases-conditions&#x2F;borderline-personality-disorder&#x2F;basics&#x2F;symptoms&#x2F;con-20023204" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mayoclinic.org&#x2F;diseases-conditions&#x2F;borderline-per...</a> )<p>I find it amusing that so many facebook users are identifying Facebook&#x27;s &quot;fake&quot; news feeds as the source of the election&#x27;s problems.<p>If Facebook were to honestly tackle that problem, there won&#x27;t be much Facebook left.

This is why I just don&#x27;t bother reading most news articles because even when the news isn&#x27;t from a fake site you still have many factual errors or context being removed from specific events&#x2F;quotes&#x2F;reports&#x2F;etc that are discussed in any given article. This is an issue larger than just some kid putting up fake news on a site to generate clicks for ad revenue. It&#x27;s an issue that includes what I would consider established news outlets like the major newspapers and magazines. It&#x27;s just weird to see how often the news is so bad in terms of fact checking that often I just skip news altogether.

Indeed, instead get your news from the paper of record. You know, the one that joined the administration in selling us all a war that cost trillions of dollars and killed a million people.<p>(And ABC, CBS, the list goes on of course. Not just NYT.)

Wasn&#x27;t there the simpsons episode when Homer started spreading fake news on the internet to become famous?

Right. People just need to leave their bubbles, read from a variety of sources, and not rely on their friends for news.<p>Obviously easier said than done. But personally that&#x27;s what RSS feeds are great for.<p>Long ago in 2011, there was a lovely TED talk about the possible bubbles forming. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ted.com&#x2F;talks&#x2F;eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles#t-525514" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ted.com&#x2F;talks&#x2F;eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_b...</a>

If the problem is that Facebook provides an echo-chamber that exacerbates the influence of one particular viewpoint, wouldn&#x27;t the solution be for Facebook to begin injecting opposing content directly into the newsfeed?<p>You can kind of see this with trending topics. If you don&#x27;t follow a particular topic but suddenly see it trending in your feed, there&#x27;s a chance you may random walk into clicking it. If Facebook opens up a global&#x2F;regional&#x2F;local newsfeed that isn&#x27;t highly targeted, then you could potentially start seeing more original content.

How much media incompetence is needed to rely on Facebook as serious news source? It&#x27;s very difficult for me to understand this. And no, I&#x27;ll gonna continue reading all sorts of stuff posted on Facebook, no matter if Edward Snowden or Hillary Clinton call them &quot;News&quot; or not.<p>By the way, don&#x27;t forget to stop relying on Whatsapp, Snapchat and Chatroulette for your News.<p>Sorry for being so sarcastic but this is just so incredibly stupid. Please make Media (Competence) a subject in all schools world-wide!

&gt;Facebook &gt;news<p>Well, this is news to me. I never ever realizes some people use facebook for this, lol. Sharing some articles? Yeah. Some funny or family pictures? Sure. News source? Really?

The bigger issue is, many of these same folks are not gonna stop buying into &quot;echo chamber&quot; news and gossip just because FB stops publishing it. Sad as it is, this is what Fox News is to a super lesser extent. This is what shooting the sh-t at the bar with your buddies is.<p>We don&#x27;t need less fake news. We need a more educated and engaged public. Now that we have a president-elect that campaigned on gutting public funding, including Dept. of Education, well, we&#x27;ll see how that goes.

Alright, but who should people rely on?<p>From an article posted earlier today on HN: almost all the media is colluding with Clinton&#x2F;Dems: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:Ook1v2WQc-gJ:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sharylattkisson.com&#x2F;newsgate-2016&#x2F;+&amp;cd=1&amp;hl=en&amp;ct=clnk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:Ook1v2...</a><p>Site is down so giving google cache.

Maybe there should be something like the hacker-news reputation, only derived by the validated truth of the sources you quote and forward. And it should be mandatory on all things you post. And people should have the option to hide &quot;unreliable&quot; narrators - and gain the loss of a falsifieer, by disproving somebody else s story.

Man, I&#x27;m going to miss Gwen Ifill.

Do people really rely on facebook for news? I mean, I do not use any FB app other than the webapp that too in a private window with a different user agent. FB spooked me once by suggesting to me a person with whom I interacted totally via github (and probably gmail)

So basically not much different than reading the national enquirer while standing in line at the grocery store, garbage in garbage out. All about greed and ads. People should be marching the streets, setting cars on fire, &quot;not my facebook&quot; over this.. )

I have to point out again that the media is making money by manipulating the masses. If you not pay for it, you are the product. Your time, attention, data, money and also your vote. FB is not better or worse than any other media company. Only more efficient.

Fake news exist before the emerge of social media such as Facebook and Twitter. It&#x27;s like spam but harder to locate. I don&#x27;t think Facebook can attach this issue properly since they have the ability to stop this from the very beginning.

Here we are again, take every top tech article and put the word Snowden in front of it.

Seems like most commenters here didn&#x27;t read the article. Snowden isn&#x27;t suggesting you leave facebook because of free flow of fake news.<p>Quite the opposite, he&#x27;s saying facebook controls the flow of news too much.

I hope now people see the rationale for this:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11403730" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11403730</a><p>The first comment nailed it.

I have a different take on this (sort of). I think it&#x27;s enormously empowering that anyone in the world can be a &quot;publisher&quot; and reach millions of people with stories through the internet.<p>The next phase of this evolution, I think, will be to ensure that we train humanity how to deal with this. I think it could be as simple as working hard to improve everyone&#x27;s ability to (a) build an argument about something, and (b) to critique someone else&#x27;s argument about something.<p>Once we (the majority of the general public) know how arguments are constructed and what is required to &quot;prove&quot; or &quot;disprove&quot; them, we&#x27;ll be a far healthier world.

And that&#x27;s why I visit hackernews more than facebook.

Why is social media getting all the flak? What about all the fake news on Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, CNN, Fox News, et al?

Is anyone on HN relying on Facebook for news?<p>Do people outside of typical HN users know who is&#x2F;take advice from Snowden?<p>This seems a bubble of pointlessness.

I miss the myspace days when we just modified our profiles and chatted with each other. There was no &quot;news feed.&quot; Facebook was unbearable before the election, I stopped logging in more than once a week just to check on family. I don&#x27;t care what anyone&#x27;s opinion of the day is on the political issue of the day.

After Brexit and Trump, I realize how much of an echo chamber my Facebook account is.

I&#x27;m posting this on Facebook

Newspeak, Thoughtcrime, Facebook, Saveyourself, Createtime, Deleteaccount.

More generally, stop reyling on any single platform for your news.

This is a similar warning to &quot;Don&#x27;t eat the yellow snow&quot;. It makes very good sense but probably many will not pay attention until they actually get burned.

Snowden comment too much about what people doing or thinking,does he has nothing to do in he&#x27;s own life?

Do not blame Facebook because you lose in election.The MSM is far more worse than FB.Use your brain.

ignorance is power, apparently.

I know it&#x27;s off-topic to comment on the quality of a submission, but this is the first time I&#x27;ve been truly shocked by a #1 HN story. Normally when there is some discussion about relevance to HN, I can at least say &quot;this is not really for me, but there&#x27;s no problem with it being here&quot;. This is so mundane and obvious that I suspect non-normal voting. If you found this story interesting - why?<p>&quot;On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one&#x27;s intellectual curiosity.&quot;

I really think this problem is way overblown. Most people follow many different news sources. I personally don&#x27;t even rely on Facebook for news at all.

Fair enough.<p>I mean it was Wikileaks that more or less decided this election, but sure... let&#x27;s all be worried about Facebook&#x27;s unchecked power, unaccountable methods and unknown motives.<p>After all, it&#x27;s not as if one of the Presidential candidates, now President, implied that the entirety of American media was controlled directly by the DNC, and thus not to be trusted, while praising and legitimizing Wikileaks by name. There&#x27;s no possibility of a dangerous political or cultural precedent having been set by having half the country believe in nothing other than what Wikileaks publishes.<p>Facebook is evil, but I don&#x27;t believe it&#x27;s the elephant in the room.

I am more than a little disappointed in Snowden for falling for this gambit. Blaming the &quot;fake news on the internet&quot; for the loss to Trump is just the Left&#x27;s way to divert attention to their own failures to report fairly or even try to understand his popularity without dismissing or smearing everyone as racists, homo-phobes and misogynists. This latest post-election narrative is a ploy, and if it gains any traction, it will allow the Left to avoid the mea culpa&#x27;s and soul-searching that they need in order reclaim their shredded credibility.<p>Far more importantly, especially for the denizens of HN, is that this call to regulate and control the news on the internet cannot be used to institute government controls, licensing, &quot;pressure&quot; or threats, etc. as a solution. Private companies cannot practice censorship so Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Breitbart, etc. are all free to establish their own policies on what to carry on their properties. This is far far different from the government becoming the arbiter of what is &quot;fake&quot; or not or what is politically or socially acceptable or not and then using the power of the state to silence you with threats, fines, jail or even death (in some countries) if you anger the gang in power. Keep a close eye on any FCC proposals because now that they have regulatory control over the internet[1] the legal authority is already in place to censor the internet. If they start floating regulations or even &quot;suggestions&quot; that claim we have to vet the &quot;news&quot; for the &quot;public-good&quot; look out[2]. You have been warned.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;02&#x2F;27&#x2F;technology&#x2F;net-neutrality-fcc-vote-internet-utility.html?_r=0" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;02&#x2F;27&#x2F;technology&#x2F;net-neutrality-...</a><p>[2] &quot;The Property Status of Airwaves&quot; by Ayn Rand &quot;Now observe the practical demonstration of the fact that without property rights, no other rights are possible. If censorship and the suppression of free speech ever get established in this country, they will have originated in radio and television&quot; [i.e. via the FCC]. In &quot;Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal&quot; <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.criminalgovernment.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;aynrand.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.criminalgovernment.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;aynrand.html</a>

What I wonder is how many humans he actually stands or sits next to each day and talks. Not online. Not camera to camera. But human to human &#x2F; human to HIS mother-father - child