Never before in history have our communities been so interlinked; the boons and benefits of social media, and the internet as a whole, cannot be understated, for through them information is proliferated in ways it never has before, and is available now to more people than ever. Such revolutionary developments have their pitfalls, however, and that which is popularly being referred to as fake news is blighting the network of information that these past decades have so carefully crafted. Falsity in reporting is hardly a new phenomenon. The problem arises from how easy it now is to inject it into the stream of information that flows into the public, and how simple it is to disguise it as credible fact when it is truly nothing but deception.
These frustrations require some solution, lest we suffer further descent of our public by this corruption of our most sacred and powerful unifying force: our now nearly limitless capacity to communicate. But what solution would suffice that could not be called an injustice? What remedy is there that exists that would not prompt a vicious outcry, a rally for the preservation of that vital, considered even inherent, part of our society: free speech? For in spite of the public fury stirred over falsities and calumnies spread through the world like fact, there has likewise been an equally insistent voice deriding the very thought of attempting to censor what others may have to say.
Yet there is another facet to this corruption – it is far more complicated than lies being spread as truth and being difficult to recognize. It is true, much of the public is inclined to believe news at face value, especially when encountering information that subscribes to the worldviews they have adopted. However, these same people also wield the label of fake news as a hammer, a weapon with which they seek to strike down that information that opposes their ideals or beliefs. Fake news is more than an inconvenience; quite the opposite, in fact. It serves as an incredibly convenient tool for one seeking to discredit that which does not conform to the palette.
This complexity, along with the determined preservation of free speech – a goal that will perpetually remain noble – makes the question about what to do about this phenomenon difficult to answer. Regulation is one simple remedy. However, allowing the government to regulate the news is a slope far too slippery to be navigable, and the public would never accept it, such is their mistrust now of their authority figures. It is this mistrust that would likewise ensure that what facts the government put forth and emphasized as truth would be viewed with even more skepticism. The more an organization seeks to convince the world of their veracity, the more doubt they accrue, and the more skeptics they create.
Another proposal, if implemented properly, could aid in alleviating the problem, if only marginally. There are, at the moment, independently-operated websites that check facts, confirm the authenticity of statements, and point out glaring errors in reporting. These services are quickly becoming more and more necessary for the preservation of the sanctity and increasingly crippled credibility of our information proliferation. However, they are utilized with far less frequency than they should. The devotion of resources, either privately or through the government, to maintain these websites and bring them to the forefront of our culture, would be one step of many to, rather than regulate speech and communication through the censorship that would create a furious public, establish what information is credible, and what information should be discarded or ignored.
Setting limitations on what can be read and viewed in society is a dangerous prospect, given the sanctity of the precepts that have long stood in opposition of just that. So in lieu of such limitations, encouragement to seek the truth and emphasis on identifying what is truly false is perhaps even vital to society. The public needs to quickly understand whether the object of its attention is a deception, or the truth. We have established the communication we require to make our society truly great. Now we must maintain it.