I don't know why this seems to be so hard for people to understand. We already have, very effective I might add, laws that tackle grey areas. The entire notion of "due diligence" in business is this exactly. As a business you have to prove that you did all that a "reasonable" (deliberately vague to allow the term to grow as technology does) entity would to follow the law.

Suddenly the idea of "fake news" isn't so murky. A reporter doing his/her due diligence in 2003 could have concluded there were wmds in Iraq, a reporter in 2017 that says the same is a hawker of fake news. It's not a hard bar to apply, especially to the most grievous offenders today (the Breitbarts and Huffington posts of the world for example).

There's no overlord trying to hide the conspiracies of the world, it's just bringing a much needed regulation to the news, as essential component to the modern democracy.

> There's no overlord trying to hide the conspiracies of the world, it's just bringing a much needed regulation to the news, as essential component to the modern democracy.

Who defines 'reasonable' when 'news' is inherently opinionated? The one with the deepest pockets for legal protection?

Who says that only 'businesses' are and should be the ones reporting news?

And who regulates the regulators?

Seriously.. EFF v ATT, for starters, along with any of the entirely half baked 1-sided, spin-laden 'real news' that is coming out of just about any major entity these days..

>A reporter doing his/her due diligence in 2003 could have concluded there were wmds in Iraq

That's what I'm afraid of. Google doing the same kind of BS "due diligence" and then forbidding counter opinions (the equivalent of "no WMDs" in 2003) as fake news.

>There's no overlord trying to hide the conspiracies of the world

No, just many private interests that treat each other well...

Baseless claims, even if they somehow turn out to be right, are still baseless and add little but information to a discussion. This insistence that every thing is abstract and thus all "opinions" are equally valid is how we got in this mess to begin with. No matter how many neonazis shout it, there's no evidence to suggest their claims of racial superiority, no matter how many times it got repeated on fucking national tv there is no evidence Planned Parenthood harvest the organs of fetuses, every image macro doesn't have to necessarily match the caption no matter what Tumblr might claim, and not matter how much money Exon spends there's mountains of data suggesting anthropomorphic climate change.

If you opinion is so unsupported that it fails basic due diligence, it shouldn't be appearing with equal weight to the supported thought. And we should continue to hold aggregators responsible for letting that shit filter to the top. Googling "food that cures cancer" should result in "No food cures cancer go talk to your oncologist" not "list of top ten super foods" from blogspam site number N; Googling "did the Holocaust happen" should result in "yes" not a link to stormfront.

I agree there certainly is a grey area when deciding on public "fact" in developing issues or contriversal subjects; but there are plenty of things far and away from that grey area and to pretend they aren't is worse than censorship. By treating valid information with the same weight as invalid information you've removed people's ability to find the facts even more effectively than if you tried to censor them (given how terrible attempts at censorship have been in the past, I wouldn't be surprised to see tyrants move to this form of information suppression).

As I say - there are edge cases.