How the war against fake news backfired

[crossfire]

Fake news has become a problem that the media and the tech industries are urgently searching for ways to solve. But in the post-election push to fix the problem, those who most want to find the solution have managed to lose control over what, exactly, the definition of “fake news” is.

Comments

[tilmon]

The problem, at least in part, is that few people understand what a credible primary source is and how to understand if it is credible. The scholarly, reasoned, use of primary sources undergirds much of not just journalism but also the liberal arts. Failure to understand is also often coupled with anger because a lot of people (perhaps some of your coworkers even?) think that history, literary criticism, anthropology, etc., are just opinion and the only reason they never did well in those classes is because their opinion didn't agree with the teachers'. Where I work, I am privy to a lot of students unloading about how they, for example, keep failing their history exams because the evil teacher asks "trick" questions and they can only try to guess the evil teacher's opinion, as if the percentage increase of immigration in the late 19th century was determined by a cabal of liberals instead of by crunching easily verified numbers.

What needs to happen is a concerted educational campaign aimed at the general public on how to critically assess information. It's no longer enough to simply say that experts were consulted. People, even a lot of college grads, don't know what makes a person an expert, and so they don't trust them. In fact, when I think about it, in the past, non-fiction wasn't published that simply relied on claims of expertise. Once upon a time, books and articles, even in popular press, came complete with footnotes actually on the same page as the information that was being presented. It was so simple to check not just for the source, but also often very interesting commentary about how some difficult concept had been developed. We have to stop being lazy. We need to cite all our sources, put them front and center, and explain how we get from A to B.