This assumes we have a chance of a Democratic government returning to power without fighting the fake news now
What can we do, as individuals, to challenge and fight it? As I can only see a collective campaign by the informed online to challenge fake news as the only way to turn the tide and get democracy back.
I don’t know. Besides the ease of creating faux news and getting it into the stream, besides the current willingness of all parties to shovel bullshit as a tactic, our Grimas Wormtongue, perched on the edge of the Resolute desk, is an experienced media mogul.
“Shouting louder” probably won’t work. And that’s before we get into things like false-flag faux news and other complications.
We already have this … Time, Newsweek, St. Olif Weekly Shopper … but people will only pay money to hear news they want to hear … if we want fair and unbiased … then there will be news people don’t want to hear … hard to keep the cash flowing in that way …
Resign yourself to playing whack-a-mole with these people. Ridicule is not inappropriate. Compare the people who thing that the Pope endorsed Trump to flat-earthers or moon landing deniers.
See, this is precisely my thinking. Clearly many here don’t think there’s much that can be done in other avenues, so we have to fight them on their front.
It’s exhausting, believe me, but it’s better to ruin their day arguing and debating then let them have the field without a fight.
Whoosh, dude. 
Absolute integrity, honesty and accuracy have to be the keystones of any such effort. Every error will be turned into proof that it’s lies all the way down.
Jokes aside, the collapse of our national journalism will probably be seen as the broken strand that led to the final fall. When the notion of “fact checking” became a thing, it was too late.
It wouldn’t be hard to do at all. Go the OccupyDemocrats page and start checking the people that follow them. Friend them, send them form letters to pay up, and make good on the threats on a few. The others will fall in line.
Those ladies are going to be rich. Richer than President Trump.
Maybe children could be employed to distribute this medium. It could provide them with a small economic boost, keep them occupied in worthwhile pursuits, and teach them job skillz while honing their entrepreneurial spirit.
In order to defame someone’s character, one must have character to begin with. One could also argue that being willing to appear in public showing support for a confessed sexual predator does enough damage to one’s reputation as can be done and altering it in photoshop does not increase the damage. One could also argue that in promoting a candidate in public, you become a public figure yourself, subject to the same satire and ridicule.
Facebook memes are a problem. Some is just stupid shit (OMG! Mars will be as big as the moon in August!, or OMG! There are 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays, and 5 Sundays this month! It only happens once every 834 years!) Some spreads dangerous lies (Did you know the 60% of the Quran is about killing non-believers?! OMG!!!). Most of the political stuff is either flat out wrong or deeply twisted (Congress STOLE $1.3 trillion from Social Security!). If Obama did 1/10 of what these Facebook memes suggest, he would have been impeached long ago. How to fix? That’s a toughie. There are millions of haters out there and it seems like they all create Facebook memes.
You can’t fix stupid, but holding journalists, at least some of them, to high standards would help.
Just throwing out ideas… perhaps being a Journalist (capital J) should be a much more regulated occupation, like being a doctor for example; a Journalist would be licensed and regularly evaluated to ascertain the quality of the work is up to standards.
In that way people would know that if X. Smith (Journalist) publishes something then that something was produced by an individual working under rigorous standards of investigation and fact checking. I would hope such professionals would be valuable to a self respecting news organization.
I favour whippings in the public square for internet trolls, preferably with lots of video footage of them pissing themselves, to be freely circulated forever.
People like comforting news. Because of this they are susceptible to fake news stories that reinforce their bias. The good news is that it does not create their biases in the first place. Obviously fake stories don’t convince people they just comfort the already convinced.
They are a symptom of the problem and not the problem itself.
I’m pretty sure you’re being sarcastic, but who would decide what constitutes an internet troll? Should we leave it up to AG Sessions?
The mainstream media is the fakest news there is, whether it’s straight up lies like their recent election polls and other pro hillary rhetoric, or their lies of omission reminiscent of all the recent Wikileaks revelations they wouldn’t cover. If this election cycle didn’t pound that home to the people, then I guess they they’re just not capable of understanding the avalanche of obvious deceit they’re bombarded with each and every day. It seems they’re just going to keep it up also, almost as if they’re getting a head start to make sure Trump gets a second term. I don’t know, you can’t fix stupid. Oh, well.
Interestingly this was posted today on WSJ. We really have to start teaching critical thinking skills.
IMHO, the solution will simply be to treat fake news or the dissemination of fake news as akin to libel or slander. Impose severe criminal/civil penalties on it.
As I mentioned in the other thread, I think it would be a useful feature if google + facebook highlighted dubious or disputed facts. This is something easier to ascertain than whether a fact is true or false.
Of course it is only helpful for those of us who actually care about whether stories are true. People who can’t think critically - and don’t want to learn - would just disable such a feature.
As I mentioned in this thread on a similar subject, that approach could have rather far-reaching consequences.
Having said that, I agree that blatantly untrue news - as in, outright lies etc not fairly being reported in good faith - probably should be subject to some sort of penalties, but how you’d actually go about implementing that would probably end up proving to be more trouble than it’s worth.
This is sounding like the liberal argument for market regulation. That is, an actual free market quickly leads to a self defeating condition where competition is removed. The government must restore competition, recreating a so called free market that isn’t really free anymore but preserving the part that actually matters. Here, a free press leads to a self defeating condition where truth is removed, so maybe the government needs to clamp down on certain speech to increase truth value.
Some people think the free press itself has more value than truth. Also there are reasons to think the two aren’t analogues, since a regulated economy can be used to increase wealth which can be useful for the government, whereas a free press seems more likely to harm government interests. It’s not a bad argument, though.
A better, more practical solution might be to fight fire with fire.
This is wishful thinking. Propaganda, advertising, and public relations actually work. People don’t believe in CTs or ideologies before being exposed to them. And the news is often not comforting at all. The best ones create anger and fear, which causes people to act. Fox News helps spread conservatism. Positive portrayal of homosexual characters in media helped make people more comfortable with gay rights. The American people didn’t wake up one day knowing that Iraq had a secret nuke program that had to be stopped right away, damn the UN inspectors.
They work for a small amount of people who want them to work. Hillary spent many multiplesof what Trump did on advertising and PR in swing states and still lost. Ford spent millions trying to get people to buy the Edsel but it didn’t work. Communist Cuba fills all the media with nothing but propaganda, but people are still risking their lives to leave. The truth is out there if people want to find it, however most people would rather live in their comfortable bubble.