The 11th Commandment: Advocating fake news/facts must be considered human right violation

As the US constitution has 27 Amendments, 10 Commandments (1/15, 1/17. 1/20, 2/24, 3/24, 5/1, 5/6, 7/25, 10/30, and 11/4/12) are not enough.  Still, seriously.

Why?  The rationale is that information is as essential as air, water, and food.  With the wrong information, a person can do great harm to himself, people around him, and even the society nowadays, see mass shooting or worse, while he can only starve to death himself. 

This Commandment is not dealing with the garden variety free speech issues.  Not about the regular Joe or Jane, whose shouting from the rooftop won’t convince anybody.  Not referring to the everyday small lies.  Not misconceptions, things due to lack of complete information that is evolving fast, like COVID-19.  Not mistakes even the best people and minds will make.  For nobody is infallible.

So this Commandment has a high standard: content of the fake news/facts must be fit the criterion of high crime and misdemeanor.  Also the keyword advocating: spouting nonsense for weeks, months, years, or even decades, indicating that he knowingly disseminates fake news/facts or at least is in a position to know it is wrong or seriously question it.  And he or she must be someone whose actions and words are of significant consequences, in a position of major power: a high ranking government official, politician, or working in big companies or media that have national/global reach.  Then, it is facts, not opinions or ideas, that count.  Not whether it was bad that Iraq had WMD, itself a legitimate question, but whether Iraq had WMD in 2003 at all, a verifiable fact. 

Telling facts from opinions is something taught from an early age at schools, although it is a life-long struggle that few master.  Because it is really hard.  Facts don’t knock on your door to tell you what they are.  You have to go and find out.  And where and how you look, well, depends a great deal on your ideas, opinions, etc.  Then you analyze your “facts”, which relies, more, again, on your pre-existing notions.  What is more, someone's fact is another one's opinion.  In other words, being human is having bias.  To counter that, a method as scientific as possible is needed: gather evidence, control experiments or settings, historic lessons, and what would I do if I were in his position?

Lastly, what does “considered human right violation” mean?  What should the penalty be?  Just using analogy, if you falsely accuse someone of a murder, you should be punished as if you commit the murder yourself.  Which sounds harsh, but consider the consequence: the goal of misinformation is to poison the well, so that when this or something else comes up, the public will consciously and subconsciously support your policy position, like 70% of the US favoring the 2003 Iraq invasion, leading to vast deaths and destruction.  This is the most sinister manipulation and subversion of “democracy”, but whose application has been SOP in the West for ages.  Ask yourself: what should the reasonable punishment have been?       

Even a 1000-page monograph won’t sufficiently cover this subject, so here uses a few well-known examples to explain what and how the so-called human right defenders have been violating human rights all along.

1. Iraqis WMD.  This one is classic, but only because the whole world saw it blowing up in Bush’s face in real time, for it was neither the first nor the last fake news, and it is debatable whether it was worse than others, e.g., Vietnam.  But people forget it didn’t start with Bush.  Bill Clinton was the one who poisoned the well first.  During the second half of 1990s, Clinton and the Western media incessantly reported Iraqis WMDs, despite sanctions and inspections since 1991: whatever Iraq had in the beginning, just by natural decay under the desert heat, nothing would have survived by 1998, and no way Iraq could have bought anything to regenerate.  That was the plain fact that the Western elites willfully ignored to show the Iraqis who the boss was.  Clinton should have known it.  Bush should have known it.  Likely they did, but they pretended otherwise anyway.  The media readily sang along.  So the US public was primed to believe Iraq had WMD; then when Bush came along, of course he was right.  Iraqis deaths during Clinton, worthy according to his SOS Madeleine Albright, rivaled those in the 2000s.  Both the government and the media lied, leading to the disaster; but even minus the 2003 Iraq War, the fake news was clear human right violation.  Free speech defense can never cover the pool of blood: labeling it human right violation is being too nice to these people.  One can safely add Kosovo to the list of Clinton fake news, too, even if the pretense, “ethnic cleansing”, was harder to define than WMD. 

2. Stolen 2020 US election.  Months has been Trump saying, and counting.  Trump had power, election is important, so it fits the Commandment criteria.  Obviously the Jan 6 Capitol riot shows that fakes have consequences real fast.  Up to 40% Americans believe(d) Trump won, although most US media didn’t go along with it: even FOX was less enthusiastic than expected.  Because it was so blatantly nonsense.  Trump and his enabler-officials, therefore, should pay the price for this violation by being banned from ever holding office again. 

Still, there are two more points to make.  The first is that while the fraud referring to how votes being cast and counted never happened, some people still claim that mail voting was unsafe, so that was fraud, while others argue that the real fraud was voter suppression by setting up hurdles for voting, e.g., ID laws, limiting time and facilities, Florida requiring ex-cons to pay off fines before being allowed to vote, etc.  Obviously the latter has merit, indicating that while the US election is not technically a fraud, it isn’t the resounding representation the media would like you to believe either.  The second is that although the MSM dismissed US election fraud claims right away, they swallow reports of foreign election frauds whenever the results do not favor the candidates DOS prefers.  Like in Venezuela (for years), Bolivia (2019), and Belarus (2020), just name the latest.  Elections have winners and losers.  Losers often cry foul.  Trump and supporters took to the street, but it doesn’t make the election rigged.  MSM ignoring 40% people in the US thinking rigged election yet jumping on “fraud” in foreign elections when a much smaller percentage of the population believing so, this must be human right violation as well, since it foments unrest and deaths, which did happen every time on foreign soil, as in the US on Jan 6, 2021. 

3. QAnon, the poster boy of conspiracy theories.  It is actually not sure where QAnon fits.  On one hand, some US officials at least like it, and media people promote it.  On the other hand, to say deep state cabal selling children, crazy stuff, but is it a high crime and misdemeanor?  Major companies, FB, TWTR, GOOG, APPL, etc, are now cracking down on QAnon, election lies, and Trump.  Yet is it the right way to combat misinformation, or are the big tech companies now the judge of true vs false?  A lot of fake news, over the years, has come out of FB, TWTR, GOOG youtube, etc.  This matter receives attention only now because the US is at the receiving end of it, while before other countries were.  In fact, FB played a much bigger role leading up to the Jan 6 riot than Parler (https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/02/07/sheryl-sandberg-downplayed-facebooks-role-in-the-capitol-hill-siege-justice-department-files-tell-a-very-different-story/?sh=2c77f9a610b3), yet Parler was kicked out, while FB is too big to fail.  Given what has transpired since Jan 6, nobody argues any more that if you don’t like it you can leave to start your own platform, because these big tech monopolize.  Thus, worse than QAnon, it is actually these big tech companies that are the major carriers of fake news/facts and the human right violators.

A deeper issue is how to deal with the conflicts between free speech and fake news.  The situation is not new, for fake news are as old as human societies.  And when the “undesirable”, like the women, black, etc, got the right to vote, the same concerns arose.  What is new, however, is that the Web now allows everything goes.  The good, the bad, and the ugly.  By human nature, perhaps, the bad and the ugly always outrun the good.  The classic solution to bad speech is more speech, but more speech now means more wacky QAnon.  Whether we will see entropy eventually taking over everything is beyond the scope of this 11^th Commandment.   

4. The Trump-Russia collusion.  Fake, at least in the sense that Trump was not smart enough to plan anything like that (12/30/18, 12/31/19 blogs).  Then how about CNN, MSNBC yapping about it since 2017?  Like QAnon, not sure if it elevates to the level of high crime and misdemeanor.  Maybe it is simply politics as usual.  What it achieves at most is showing Trump in a bad light, but he is in such a deep hole without it already.  Those media did a poor job reporting facts, duh, but also an inconsequential one.

5. WCEV (May 1, 2020 blog).  Here is definitively one long-lasting fakes-promoting, human right violation.  The Western governments and media are all in it together, fakes never ending, outlandish claims one after another, the latest being COVID-19 and Xinjiang.  For more thorough debunking, see 11/28/20 and 12/28/20 blogs.  Bottomline: as most Americans look at QAnon or voter-fraud followers with incredulous disbelief, exactly the same way the Chinese look at Americans, conservatives and liberals alike, absorbing all the WCEV craps. Repeat, in no uncertain terms: believing in Xinjiang genocide equals believing in Q.

Fake news, e.g., China made the virus, China covered up the virus, Xinjiang concentration camps, genocide, are extraordinary claims.  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.  But never is there any real evidence supporting those claims to begin with, at a minimum, then all easily dispelled by overwhelming facts.  For example, when someone said China made the virus, what evidence did he provide?  Not counting the mouth, nothing!  It was scientists around the world that examined the virus sequence and determined its natural origin: DNA/RNA don’t lie. 

How about the Chinese coverup?  So automatic as if it was the West covering up for China?  Again, zero evidence, only claims that fell apart upon inspection: perhaps half of my 2020 blogs were written to trash it.  In fact, following the same Western governments and media logic, the UK, US, etc, are doing much more coverup than China.  For example, the UK found the B117 variant in Sept and announced its importance in Dec.  China recorded the first case on Dec 26-27, published the virus sequence on Jan 11 (maybe even earlier).  So the UK coverup is 6 times longer than China!   Well, it is wrong to make that argument about the UK or China, because even though B117 was first sequenced in the UK, it does not mean it originated there, and scientists and doctors needed time to observe and digest the data anyway, if 3 months so be it.  But even today, there are people, including some CNN anchor, who believe the COVID-19 situation might be worse in China than in the US.

Because of WCEV and the fakes, the West paid little attention to China in Jan 2020, then didn’t believe anything out of China in Feb 2020.  Then they paid the price in March 2020, which shows WCEV is deadly.  Then they blamed China.

With COVID-19 still fresh and warm, the latest fake, sorry, fashion, is Xinjiang.  Taken by the mainstream in all earnest, but in actuality not unlike the voter-fraud or QAnon lies in the US, this farce has been dissected in my 11/28/20 blog.  The most recent fake from BBC, (which is widely panned in China, so it doesn’t count,) featured a woman who claimed to be raped by masked men, so many times over 9 months, in a concentration camp.  The story is so fishy that one smells Kuwait “incubator babies”, 30 years away!  Just her words, noting else. In fact, even the Trump camp had more voter-fraud evidence and witnesses than Xinjiang (11/28/20 blog), and the same people in BBC's story said nothing special in previous interviews by other foreign press, even denied what they said now had ever happened!  BBC said they couldn’t verify the story because China won’t allow independent investigation, but reported it regardless.  For one, tons of foreigners have visited Xinjiang in recent years, saying nothing of sort.  For two, if I were a Chinese official, I wouldn’t believe BBC can do independent investigation or reporting either.  For three, a reasonable person doesn’t believe China needs to prove a negative, but BBC needs to prove a positive first.  And nobody has provided any convincing evidence about concentration camps, forced labor, or whatever.  For four, Iraq allowed the UN inspection in 2003.  What did the UK and US do next?  

The UN definitions of human rights are broad, unlike the narrow ones often touted by the West.  But advocating fake news/facts should be added as a major violation.  This Commandment needs to stick to reign in the powerful government officials, big companies, and media so that they don't lie constantly yet get away easily.  You can't spout baseless and ludicrous claims, and when found nonsense (and having caused great damage) later, merely claiming free speech for protection, then spout more new lies again.