Basically everyone has little knowledge about the vast majority of things. People who have strong beliefs generally think they have good evidence for them (even if what they think is clearly untrue and their evidence is nonsensical).

I’ve heard of “appeal to authority” and such, but at the end of the day I think that it’s generally sensible to just believe the mainstream expert consensus on something until you’re given good evidence otherwise, especially if you’re dealing with hard science.

Of course it’s ideal to know more about a topic than basic things you were told and took as fact and this should be paired with some level of media literacy and critical thinking, though.

Nobody cares bro. My farts smell better than yours

Bruh when did I say “we need to be like the Chinese party-state because they have freedom of expression and information”?

I’m trying to say that this Article 19 group has no real principles beyond: “UK government protecting our ‘information integrity’=good. Chinese censorship and ‘misinformation’=bad.” Also it’s not even “Chinese media ownership”, it’s a US firm with a chairman who has ties to China.

But if you can’t follow this beyond “this guy clearly loves China and hates Britain, I need to explain why China is worse”, then go off I guess.

This article is so strange to me. Do these guys want “media plurality” and “freedom of expression and information” or to stop people with links to China from owning UK news outlets? On the one hand they’re talking about this ideal of freedom of press and on another it’s about how we need to restrict who can control the press. “Information integrity” sounds like justification for censorship to me.

It’s so full of vague, conflicting ideals.

The idea of laws about transparency of ownership and funding seems reasonable I suppose. It’s good media literacy to find out what you can about who owns and funds a news outlet. That’s why I looked into who’s behind this “Article 19” organisation.

https://www.article19.org/financials/

Ah… The UK and US governments, along with the infamous “National Endowment for Democracy”. Seems it’s bad when China tries to control the narrative, but not the UK or US.

As for whether I personally think this US firm that has some links to China should be allowed to buy the Telegraph, I don’t care much either way, as long as I can access the media I want to and look up who owns it. It does seem like they’re trying to set a precedent for blocking foreign outlets they don’t like though.