As our government becomes more and more polarized, what can we do to ensure that facts and data hold out?
I’m not suggesting that lying should be illegal (in fact, it’s often unintentional), but when an MPs statement can later be proven to be false, shouldn’t they be forced to publicly apologize?
The truth shouldn’t be political.
And how do you determine the truth, exactly?
There isn’t a magical bell that rings when someone lies. Science changes, public consensus changes, new facts surface, and opinions are just opinions.
Of course if an MP makes an easily disproven statement that’s one thing, but most things that could be said are complex and very hard to define as either true or false.
I don’t necessarily disagree that there should be extra checks for truth in politics, but I don’t really think there can be such a thing, objectively.
Fact check. If someone fact checks you and finds that your statement was false then you are sanctioned. It doesn’t have to be a magic bell. If someone’s fact checking team looks into what you said and comes back the next day and says “point of order, what xyz said yesterday was a lie and here is the proof” they get a sanction.
And how do you establish that is not a lie? Proof that a statement was false does not prove that the falsehood was stated intentionally. The person may have simply been misinformed, misspoke, or otherwise didn’t know any better, in which case it would not be a lie.
It’s up to voters to hold politicians to account on this, but voters don’t and so why would they care about any other system that does.
If a politician says climate change is fake and they agree it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, they’ll just accuse the moderator of bias.