Obama Calls for Tech Industry to Provide "Truthiness" Curation a.k.a. Censorship
10/16/2016
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From Yahoo News on the President’s speech at Carnegie-Mellon:

Obama decries ‘wild west’ media landscape

Pittsburgh (AFP) – President Barack Obama on Thursday decried America’s “wild, wild west” media environment for allowing conspiracy theorists a broad platform and destroying a common basis for debate.

Recalling past days when three television channels delivered fact-based news that most people trusted, Obama said democracy require citizens to be able to sift through lies and distortions.

“We are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to,” Obama said at an innovation conference in Pittsburgh.

“There has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard, because they just don’t have any basis in anything that’s actually happening in the world,” Obama added. …

“The answer is obviously not censorship, but it’s creating places where people can say ‘this is reliable’ and I’m still able to argue safely about facts and what we should do about it.”

The answer is not censorship. Obviously.

The answer must be curating for truthiness.

That’s completely different.

This reminds me of my Taki’s Magazine column from a couple of weeks ago “From Orwell to Gladwell and Back.” It’s not unknown for my critiques of trends to show up later transmogrified into demands for more of the trend.

[Comment at Unz.com]

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