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

[amw]

Some guys on my Facebook started whining because their beloved satire sites are being included in the first round of fake news filters. I avoided getting into that dumpster fire of a conversation, because my view is that there is very little difference between Infowars and WWN and the Onion. You have to go down this messy path of saying "well it's not the content that matters, it's the intent". So if the intent is propaganda and disinformation, then it's fake news, but if the intent is entertainment and satire, then it isn't? What about if the intent is just to make money by getting the most clicks? In my books it's all garbage.

The challenge when it comes to filtering this stuff is how to police intent. I mean, certainly we do it already with things like murder 1 vs murder 2, or hate crimes vs "regular" assault... But in those instances there is in any case a crime, so a decision on degree is made by the legal system. When you are comparing two pieces of media that are both protected speech under the First Amendment and from an objective point of view look equally as "fake", who gets to decide which one is satire and which one is propaganda? Who gets to decide if the writers are in it for the comedy or for the money or for nefarious political reasons?

I really hate that Democrats have gone off on this fake news tangent in the last few weeks. There is no question that this election saw unprecedented levels of propaganda that most certainly tipped the scales against Clinton (if not toward Trump per se), but trying to get tech companies to police that in their social networks or whatever is not the answer, imo. People still believed in conspiracies before Facebook. Remember 9/11 Truthers? Yeah that was a thing. Remember Swiftboating? All that happened before Facebook. It'd be nice if social media websites took a moral stance on this nonsense and blocked all of it, including elitist liberal "satire", but even if they did that it wouldn't stop people believing the nonsense.

I think the best way to fight propaganda is better education and healthcare (specifically mental health). Republicans are talking about rolling back the ACA and privatizing Medicare next year. I think stopping that clusterfuck is way more important than leaning on some rich Silicon Valley douchenozzles to tweak their algorithms. Hell, knocking on some rich Silicon Valley doors is really not doing anything to combat the other big conspiracy of the campaign that Democrats are the party of the elite. I mean, ffs.