What do we do to fight fake news?

Great Debates
1

I get that it’s been around since mankind learned language, but the internet of recent years has made it so cheap to host news sites that it’s become a torrent of absolute tosh and lies.

I’ve seen what we would label as conspiracy theorists crop up here and elsewhere from time to time and I’ve attempted to debate them. But, understandably, the byword has been ‘don’t feed the trolls’, and we let them ramble on unchallenged.

Perhaps by not feeding them, we’ve allowed the online community to gobble poison?

At the same time it is a hard battle. Right now I’m arguing with two separate groups on Facebook: one arguing that the EU is a federal superstate and the Commission dictates to the UK, and another which insists that Trump won the popular vote. No number of citations or links satisfies them, it’s all fake news and mainstream media.

I try to get them to justify how their news is in any way more authoritative purely because it says what they want to hear, but of course they disengage or evade.

It’s infuriating, as my instinct is that despite this, we have to do something to challenge this, otherwise it becomes fact.

I may not persuade the person I’m directly arguing with, but there may be an observer who is quietly slightly more intellectually curious than my opponent, who might be invited to think again thanks to what I say.

As exhausting and unprofitable as it may seem, I am starting to think the best and only way we can fight this threat to our democracies is to fight a WW1-style battle of attrition with them online. We have to invade their comments sections, swamp their debates, invade their bubbles (and invite them into ours) and flame-war the beJesus out of them. Like I said, it will be bloody, ugly, distressing and hair-whitening, but…what’s the alternative?

A free press is a great thing, but a free press where the truth has no value next to outright lies is no free press at all.

This is my current train of thought. Am I wrong? What would be a more profitable means to deal with this danger? What can I - and we - do?

2

There is definitely an increase in spreading of false information especially on established social media like facebook. Internet specifically social media has amplified the way in which people spread false information.

I guess it’s just human nature, that always sounds like a good excuse to me. Social media just exploits this basic nature that people have, wanting to spread information or get across their beliefs or reiterate / defend their beliefs.

3

There is, in my view, only one answer that is we have to teach children how to think critically. Unfortunately, promoting critical thinking, in particular in the US, I think would be taken as an assault on Christianity. But it is virtually impossible to change the mind of an adult who believes that Brietbart, Inforwars, OccupyDemocracts, Whale.to, Natural News, etc is legit.

Edit: I am not saying that people who are religious are not capable of thinking critically. I’m just making a prediction as to how it would be perceived by the more fundamentalist types.

4

That’s fine, but…what do we do in the meantime? I agree we have to educate kids to be much more critical in their assessment of information, but by they time they are old enough to vote, Trump’s successors could be enjoying a continuous run of government through generating online propaganda - and killing critical thinking off entirely in the process.

What can we do now? I am expecting someone to disagree with my thoughts that we need one huge, colossal, Verdun-like flame war, but what else can we do?

5

Communication used to have a higher cost and higher traceability. The current solutions for electronic communications have dropped the cost to next to nothing and made it easy for the origin to be either lost or deliberately hidden.

For email it has meant ubiquitous and never ending spam. Spamfilters have helped a lot, but various nefarious messages still sneak through. For social media it has meant a thoroughly shallow approach to consuming information and a flood of false news, and on this arena a spam filter is not going to help at all. If anything it will make things worse.

The way I see it the only real solution will be to abandon to current platforms for platforms that inherently prioritise accuracy and depth over ease of sharing and speed of consumption. But I think we have a ways to fall still before that becomes apparent to enough people, if ever.

6

Free Press is a great thing … and the Press is free to lie …

There’s a subtle point here … politically popular Press doesn’t need Constitutional protection … only the worst kinds, most despicable, vile and nastiest of Press needs Constitution protection …

So … yeah … we wind up with fake news sites claiming there’s fake news sites publishing fake news … and this has been going on ever since the USA threw down the shackles of the Hanoverian Overlords … people who matter can tell the difference … those that don’t matter, well who cares … fodder to keep their small minds busy …

Facebook is a lost cause … so many memes being spewed out and they spread like wildfire … just saw another “Mars will be as big as the Moon tomorrow night” meme … there’s just no fighting that level of ignorance there … I do try with people I care about, but it’s a delicate line … I have many friendship links solely to hear a point of view unlike my own … the young Israeli girl spews fake news all the time … but she’s my best source for rocket-by-rocket accounting when Hamas gets a hare up their collective asses … “my plates got knocked off the wall today when the daycare next door blew up” … there’s an intimacy there you can’t get from the normal news outlets …

I’ve found that fake news rarely gets any traction here on the SDMB … here we have a tradition of vetting these things and we all know the call …

“Cite?”

7

This might seem like a silly answer to the question, but really the problem is genetics.

It’s not just media (and, I’ll note, I don’t think the problem is with the Internet specifically, so much as the free market), there are several ways in which our species is crossing a threshold. We’ve gone from being able to supply ourselves with food, to being able to craft foods that are so tightly targeted to our evolutionary desires for calorically dense, fiber-free foods that our bodies can’t fully cope with the diet that is available to us on the free market. We have weapons of destruction so powerful that, should anyone ever use them, it could possibly mean the end of our species. Imminently, we may have technologies that render unskilled and manual labor completely unnecessary, with who knows what consequences for economics and social stability.

Through science and technology, we have developed a world that lets us get to the place that we want to be according to our natural predilections. But those desires were developed tens of thousands of years ago, for a style of life that’s vastly different than the one we are in, and the speed of change is growing.

To continue on, we are either going to need to modify ourselves to be more intelligent and have desires that are based on rational thought, rather than primitive goals to procreate, eat, and maintain dominance of territory. But that’s going to be a hard transition, if we can make it at all. It’s possibly more likely that we’ll create AI, and hope that it carries on our legacy after we destroy ourselves.

The only alternative, for the question at hand, is to stop the free market and to censor speech. And, if human nature hasn’t changed, I suspect that wouldn’t be particularly successful.

Fundamentally, most people don’t want to be challenged. Genetically, we are pack animals. Most people want to “belong” and be told what to do. The free market rewards businesses who provide products that give people what they want, and those businesses reward the smartest and most creative individuals in society for inventing those sorts of products, be they food, robots, or news articles. And so when you pair these things, you end up with products that allow people to live in their bubble, to amplify their sense of being part of a group, of maintaining dominance, etc.

The free market is an awesome and impressive thing, which has brought us medicine, shelter, and food the likes of which our ancestors could only have dreamed. To date, it has been a wondrous and desirable thing. But it’s also a Pandora’s Box. Getting what you want isn’t always good for you, and it’s basically impossible to keep people from what they want when it’s economical on the free market. We could wish that education would work, but most of our species are idiots, and within a few generations, even the smartest of us might be too dumb to handle the technology that we’re producing. Point in fact, that’s already true. I’m sure there are plenty of geniuses out there who have diabetes, because they just can’t control their urges. Smarts only go so far. Restraint is an entirely different beast, and that’s what’s necessary when you give a monkey the technologies of a space faring species.

8

Fake news in its current state is an obvious, inevitable end result of a profit-driven media and direct 24/7 access to the revenue source (We The People) via the internet.

There are many amazing things that our instant access to gobs of information has enabled, but ultimately I don’t know that, all things considered, we’re better off in a digital world. We like to think that we are sophisticated enough to identify and handle all of the consequences of the massive cultural shifts we’ve been going through, but I don’t think we truly are.

I second Sage Rat’s post.

9

So…we’re doomed? We should just let the fake news roll over us and embrace it? Let the Trumpers character-assassinate every rival to the alt-right that appears?

10

I don’t think it’s a silly answer, but I do think you’re ignoring opportunities with this bleak premonition, and I’d like to spin on your imagery to explain why.

We already censor speech and restraint the free market. Companies could sell a lot more pure sugar if they were allowed by law and the will of the people to just lie, and the law here is rather weak, it’s people not accepting lies that is more important.

Fake news would happen on its own in the current media environment, but the main driving force behind the flood is that it pays. Advertisers pay out for views, no matter where, and mainstream media skips fact-checking because they are in an economic squeeze. Change the flow of money and you change the environment. Just as doctors, sensible politicians and sensible consumers have restrained sellers of greasy, salty, sugar bombs to at least some extent, journalists, sensible politicians and sensible consumers could choke off a lot of the money flowing into false news. But it would require some serious commitment to make an actual difference.

11

We could create a nationwide chain of news sources, run by trusted journalism professionals, that manage to separate their advertising and editoral sides - if they have an ad side at all. Scale each one to the size of the town, city or market served. There could even be overlapping sources, each with a different political viewpoint, that could factually investigate, report on and argue the issues of the day and area.

They would need to stay above politics themselves, except in special identified sections of opinion (as opposed to fact-based, fact-checked news), and develop reputations for incorruptibility by firmly resisting all political, financial or profit-driven pressure.

Could work.

12

But who funds this ideal news service … we have a government funded news outlet … but they’re slanted towards the “tax-and-spend” liberals … no way are they going to be fair with the politician’s who want to gut public-funding for these news outlets …

The best way to get the news is through a variety of sources … although each has their own slant … it’s with the all the slants we can ferret out The Truth …

13

I think a subscription service could fund this, augmented with individual sales, perhaps through semi-independent agents working on street corners or somesuch.

14

Indeed. You could even find a format that’s sufficiently independent of power supplies at the point of consumption to be portable anywhere, e.g., in a briefcase or in the hand, and when no longer needed, might serve other purposes, such as to wrap things or in emergency to double as a hat, or to supply extra entertainment value as material for, I dunno, something like origami.

15

Ron Paul is off to a good start in exposing them.
Revealed: The Real Fake News List

16

Given that large percentages of people still believe in ghosts, astrology, UFOs, and so forth, I think shaking them loose from convenient, convincing, earnest faux news is going to prove a challenge.

17

Any kind of government ownership or funding would be immediate grounds for disqualification of trust. Crowd-funding only.

18

Toughen and reform the libel laws.

For instance, a photo of four women holding a " Make America Great Again" was altered into “Make America White Again” was shared on the Internet. I had a few friends post it on their Facebook page. Everyone who shared that image should held accountable for civil damages.

I think that if we make accusations of racism or homophobia similar to committing a crime that the lawyers will have plenty of work. It will also tone down the rhetoric.

19

Along with the copyright laws that involve actual monetary losses and damage and are damn near unenforceable on the net? Good luck.

It would turn into a tool of the powerful/in-power, out of financial and legal reach of anyone smaller than a corporation.

20

Missed edit:

I suspect, from your example, that you don’t recognize the irony of demanding more legislation and proportional increases in “government” to enforce and oversee it. No, we have reached (even considerably exceeded) the point where rules and laws and regulations and control will counter the tide of human nature. Only education, both in knowledge increase and in that elusive goal “critical thinking,” can possibly save us now.

Meaning, of course, that we’re fucked. It’s mob rule, and the mob has captured the flag this time, and the trend of the powerful against the masses having knowledge and being able to reason is only going to get stronger. Bullshit “news” created to appeal to and reinforce prejudices is going to become the norm, or at least a substantial part of the mix, increasingly difficult to sort out from reality.