I think disinformation is mostly an education issue.

Things I learned in an American high school which are good to know but not everyday useful:

- Geometry - Calculus - Basic chemistry - 'Art' - History of my state (like, seriously?)

Things I didn't really learn in high school but would be immensely useful in combating disinformation:

- Probability and statistics - How to conduct experimental trials - How to read (scientific) papers critically - How the US Govt works, in-depth - Classical logic - Formal debate - The Socratic Method and other mental models for divergent thinking - World religions and theology - Basic psychology - Cybersecurity, or really any kind of "adversarial" thinking - Meditation and self-discipline

I have no idea why we continue to teach so much trig/calc instead of statistics. Statistics is (IMHO) harder to understand and more important, but schools spend significantly less time on it.

Uhhh, no.

Seems like someone conveniently overlooked the US’s First Amendment.

You can fight disinformation without censorship tho

I don’t think the actual fact is really up for debate. Disinformation is in the same category as phishing, social engineering, and online scams; they’re just targeted at more than one mark at a time.

We deal with phishing with both education and blocking. Because I could, right now, craft a phishing email targeting my own company that would get an 85%+ success rate of stealing their SSO passwords. No amount of education could realistically stop me because I know just what buttons to press. We would respond to this by yoinking the email out of everyone’s inbox.

The debate is what are the acceptable measures to deal with the it which spawns a secondary debate about how large the problem is which determines how aggressive is acceptable.

> Disinformation is still an emerging frontier for cyber security, and we will need unconventional techniques far beyond data breach notifications and regulatory fines. New alliances and partnerships must emerge between industry and government. More than that, our fundamental assumptions of what a cyber attack looks like must also evolve.

Journalists are chomping at the bit to support something that journalists, historically, have been the very first to oppose, which is a public-private partnership to control 'facts.'

Yes, we agree that conspiracy theories can be dangerous, harmful and undermining.

That's as far as civil libertarians can agree, however. I think it's not an ETHICAL question only, it's also a HISTORICAL question. If you have a history of how hard we fought against government attempts to control information flow you would find the idea of a "public-private partnership to stem misinformation" horrifying. We saw in World War I how the U.S. and Britain made it a crime to be anti-war, while journalists pumped out pro-war propaganda to get the population prepped. In the 1930's in the U.S., we saw HUAC, we saw a public-private partnership ostensibly anti-Communist, but ultimately anti-dissent, which ensured that ANY criticism of the United States internally or externally would be met with surveillance, a correction of the false facts of course, personal harassment / blacklisting, and the list goes on. Edit: for decades.

Let's do this thought experiment. What if in 2003 when Colin Powell did his speech to the UN which we now all acknowledge was falsely claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction to justify the U.S. invasion -- what would have today's Fact Checkers on Facebook or Twitter or Google have done to dissenting voices? Would Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent have vanished from Google search results? What about during Vietnam? Would we have Fact Checked people who opposed the war and reported on massacres?

And finally: did no one read 1984? Do you not remember the Ministry of Truth, where thousands of employees spent their entire day taking misinformation and throwing it down a vacuum tube?

Fact check yourselves away from Censorship. The historical narrative is against the calls for censorship. Yeah, some people think 5G causes viruses. Guess what, I know people who play the lottery every day and believe in angels. Get over it.