Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by duxup 2682 days ago
I feel like headline bickering is endless.

But I also think there is a lot of difference between even draconian copyright laws.... and China, Russia, Venezuela....

Same goes for laws enacted by democratic governments who have free press, independent courts, etc.

Your comparisons seem hardly 1:1.

1 comments

I think his point is not about comparison, but of the media putting a 'spin' on the way a news item is presented to make it more in line with their own entrenched positions, and the ethicality of their doing it.

Even considering the huge uproar about fake news, etc that the media is crying hoarse over, they seem reluctant to reform their own practices like reductive and sensationalist head line writing, and change to a more plainspeaking reportage.

I'm not sure there is automatically "spin", because of the difference.

My point being those government actions are very much in different contexts and might deserve different descriptions.

How many such laws need to be passed before we can say that the context has changed?
Well some of the context I mentioned was a democratic government, free press, independent courts, etc. So that would have to change.
My point is these don't have to be abolished at once with a single law, there can also be a gradual decline.

This law _does_ threaten free speech by basically forcing platforms introduce content filters. First to be used for copyrighted content, but once it's there it can easily be extended to hate speech, fake news, defamation and other euphemisms for the content to be censored. It basically un-does a lot of internet's democratizing effect on free speech.

I don't like the law either, it might even impact some of the context I mention, but that context is still there if we're talking about OP's headline vs headline discussion.
In terms of the areas of what the OP mentioned, there is no difference.
My point being there is more context than just what he OP mentioned.
There's also usually more context behind the stories from say Venezuela that you normally don't get, so that doesn't really say much.