Being mindful of our specific news sources.

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You did, but I don’t think his choice of case law or cites was unbiased. As I noted in my response, our judicial system relies on adversarial advocacy, and the lawyer was clearly, to me, playing the role of advocate for a specific position, presenting a case to back up the conclusion he wanted us to see. That doesn’t mean those are the most applicable cases. I look for legal discussions that present conflicting cases as part of the discussion, and an analysis of different interpretations. In the American legal system, there are ALWAYS different interpretations. If they aren’t presented, you are viewing an argument designed to persuade you to one side of possible views. When applied in the political arena, that is bias.

I heard from an information source, that Trump is picking up steam as a result of Uncle Joe's Afghani Fiasco.
Heaven help us all if he tries for the presidency again.
Time for a needle in the paw if that happens.

BTW, you are funny.
But not as humorous as a skunk.

I thought it was common knowledge that big business uses censorship to their political advantage?
I was young once too.

My memory is crap, also.
Ironic when you consider the fact we are autistic.

No Rain men or women in this corner.

I think you two should get a room courtroom.

What's really nasty is that the Biden administration, under the guise of fighting "misinformation", which is one of those slippery words prone to conveniently changing definitions, is openly pressuring the social media companies to censor people in a way that would be illegal if the government did it directly, essentially an end run around the 1st Amendment. They've also got the cudgel of potential anti-trust action cued up, which truly is the legal equivalent of a loaded gun pointed at these companies when these "requests" are made, it's exactly the sort of situation were you'd expect a properly adversarial press to make a bunch of noise, but in many cases they're actually cheer-leading this action because they agree with the current direction it's going in.

https://reason.com/2021/07/21/biden-is- ... -by-proxy/

@Brictoria, I meant only to provide an example of evaluating the level of bias, not to re-litigate the laptop situation. I do someday plan to re-dig into the issues of privacy and ownership to be sure I am remembering how those laws apply in my life correctly, but when it comes to the laptop story, those of us who lean left politically generally don’t have any interest in it, and don’t see any point to continued digging.

It’s a tough issue to me because using social media to spread false “factual” information is so dangerous to our society and the spread needs to be stopped in some way, IMHO. The average citizen doesn’t have the tools to sort out when they are being dreadfully mislead. But we do need to be sure it isn’t handled with bias, and the concept is obviously a giant slippery slope riddled with first amendment issues. I’m totally lost on what the best answer is, we’re in such an unprecedented situation, but best I have for now is to not get complacent on all the surrounding issues and continue to pay attention.

The role of lawsuit threats and the court system is another factor to be watched carefully. I both cheered and felt unease when the voting machine manufacturer got conservative news to stop spreading false claims about their machines. Inserting a standard of proof into news is necessary, but the court system, by reason of the high cost of litigation, isn’t exactly a tool to which opposing sides always have equal access.

The people doing the monitoring of alleged "disinformation" are the ones we need to fear the most. Any information that is a threat to them will be attacked, especially if exposes their corruption and crimes.

Marketplace of ideas is the only way, answer bad speech with more speech, otherwise you just make the problem worse. Imagine if the mods here had to adjudicate disputes not just according to the rules, but according to who is actually right, and then imagine trying to make that work on a global scale. Again, the only way is to get out of the way and call out bad information when you see it and make the best arguments for the truth you can, censorship only makes people curious about what you're trying to hide.

I think the mainstream left sources should be watched the most closely for this very reason, that they are assumed by many to be reliable..

disclaimer - I am not suggesting fox et al are better, just not as sneaky.

This morning on Global News I saw stats botched to make the COVID death rate appear far higher than it has been recently. They tried to pass it off as a mistake, but there may be issues with that claim..

My issue is intentionally falsifying facts. People should be held accountable for intentionally forwarding inaccurate and misleading information to a broad and trusting audience. A set of professional standards, if you will, that we can trust information organizations will adhere to. While we need a free exchange of ideas, it isn't exactly a free exchange of ideas when everyone is in dark room with half being told the sky is green, and half being told it is red. There has to be some common ground to start from. For a while we could trust that news organizations would adhere to a set of standards or be held accountable. With that being mostly out the window, we're all losers. In my profession, I'm held to a set of professional standards. I'm not held to any specific idea or opinion, but I am expected to act in accordance with the law and the facts, and have a set of parameters of what actions are required to meet my professional responsibilities. If I don't, I can lose my license. People need to be able to trust my word when I put my professional signature on a document. The standard for public discourse doesn't need to be quite as high, but I am feeling one does need to exist. Perhaps that is road social media and news could take: a set of professional standards they are required to follow, and the public knowing which sources are committed to and living by those standards. We have a large amount of precedence for such boards and standards across various professions, although Libertarian thinking probably hates them all. We used to have more for broadcast than we do now. The big fight, of course, would be who should be on the board and who creates the standards.

Of course, Fox already whittles it way out of the standards it should be subject to by claiming it is an entertainment organization, not a news one; a fact it's followers don't seem to fully understand. Loopholes like that need some attention, as well.

Not easy at all to solve.

Come to think of it, my profession was actually created in a time similar to this one: in response to society being harmed as the result of individuals not being able to rely on information. So maybe I'm finally onto something? But the devil would definitely be in the details.

zuckerburg employed peter daszak to censor posts suggesting the coronavirus was humanely humanly engineered, as an example.

Agreed.
Making *observations* about misinformation, intimidation, attempts at character assassination, ad hominems, slack research, and non-sequiturs is *not* a personal attack.