Fake news legislation

Hi guys how are you ? I have a question for you.
I'm a student and we talked about fake news at school today.
Their propagation alarme me and therefore I wanted to hear your thoughts about it. Do you think that the government should create legislation in order to help regulate them?

I think it is very important to create laws to control fake news. It is a danger for the nation because it could afraid people or bring down company.

I agree with you but the fact is that, if you create laws to control fake news it can become censorship. I mean fake news is a real problem, but freedom of speech is much more important.

Freedom of speech is something very important, but we can’t just stop there. We have to think about how to make access to information better. And if censorship has to be used in specific cases, I think it has to be made.

What do you mean by “it has to be made” ? May I remind you that we are not in North Korea and with people like you, who think like you, the democratic United States of America  will one day become a communist country !!!

Talking about North Korea. Do you remember the recent fake news about Kim Jong-un ? Everybody thought he was dead while he was still alive. Don’t forget that all it takes is a spark to set the world ablaze. How dare you call me communism?

Sorry, I burst into flames. I did not want to hurt you, I was just trying to get your attention. What I want to say is that you can delete fake news but only if you’re sure that it is fake. The rumour about KJU would never have happened without social media. They said that they put in place measures like algorithms which I think are not very efficient. Indeed sometimes they don’t understand that it is real news and delete it, on the contrary they leave some false information.

You talked about social media and like you said they took some measures. We can see that censorship can be used in a moderate way like on Twitter. If you have been on this platform recently, you should have noticed that they warn users on information which can be not fully reliable. These different methods can be used to reduce the spread of fake news. This type of censorship is very efficient. Since they introduced it, there has been a decrease of 73% of fake news on their social media.

I was not aware about this statistic but it doesn’t change my mind. We cannot censor people even though they are spreading fake news. Like I said it is undemocratic !

What is undemocratic and really dangerous for the nation is letting people by themselves in front of so much false information. So the government should do something !

The government should not promote news literacy. It would be great if they do like a campaign against fake news all around our country, so people could develop their critical sense and gain in maturity. An anti-fake news initiative launched by Finland’s government in 2014 aimed at teaching residents, students, journalists and politicians how to counter false information designed to sow division. The interesting thing is that Finland is the country where the media best withstand the problems of fake news. So the country that best educates its population about this, but more generally which tries to awaken the critical sense of the inhabitants.

Initiative like this one should be done all around the world !
I did some research and I learned some tips which could be very useful to help us to identify fake news. First of all, we need to verify the link to know if it is a reliable website or not. When we see an article about someone or something, we must check on other media if they also talk about it. When we are in front of a suspicious video, we can use some website like citizenevidence.amnestyusa.org to check if it is a deep fake or not.
I am sure that there are plenty of other methods to recognize fake news but I think those are the main ones.

When I saw your message I decided to search and I found some interesting things like the author’s goal. We need to analyse his article to find a political meaning in it especially when we are in an election time. Finally if we still have a doubt, we should check comments to see other people’s reaction about the article.

At least we agree on one point !

Yes actually I cannot agree more about your idea of educating people on fake news.

Thank you for your involvement. I can see that this is a rather complex subject and thanks to you I have something to discuss in class. Thank you very much!