The public’s greatest asset and its greatest deficiency of the moment is communication. Because we live in an age where anyone can transmit information anywhere else in the blink of an eye, the vetting process to verify that the information being transmitted is accurate gets overlooked more and more. Beyond the obvious opportunity social media affords for the individual to hold a platform without the conventional checkpoints of fact-checkers and sources as should be demanded by traditional press, esteemed publications have also become more and more flippant when it comes to reporting facts. The introduction of the internet jump-started alternative forms of online media, including sites run entirely based on ad revenue and donations, which incentivizes not only biased reporting in favor of the audience providing the most financial support, but also “clickbait” – deliberate misrepresentations of the truth to encourage another site visitation and another few cents of revenue. In short, news is spreading faster than ever before, so fake news is spreading faster than ever before.
Approaching the growth of fake news pragmatically affords that understood “truth” can change based on what’s useful in the moment; if we define fake news as “news that is not true,” we can extend misinformation to also describe information that is simply not beneficial to the public, whether because it is actively harmful to a community or because it is simply extraneous. Fake news, then, can be considered any transmitted information that is a misrepresentation of actuality or that is unnecessary and would add confusion.
The public is, on the whole, uneducated and unlikely to reason appropriately when faced with fake news. This fact is made clearly evident by the number of satirical Onion or Clickhole articles shared genuinely by millions of people through social media. It is not enough to expect the average person to be able to hold themselves accountable and fact-check news themselves if the public cannot discern when it is appropriate to question the information being presented to them. As such, the private issue of people being misinformed and hearing wildly different versions of the same stories depending on what publications they trust or people they choose to follow, becomes a public issue that must be regulated.
Factchecking sources which can be used to debunk internet myths and misinformation already exist, and while they some do have political leaning that impacts their likelihood to challenge certain sides’ ideas, neutral factcheckers like Snopes and Politifact do exist. The difference between these sources and something like Media Matters, which leans left and mostly criticizes figures from the right, is funding. Politifact, for example is funded almost entirely by non-partisan groups, removing the motivation to do a certain type of reporting that would be more profitable.
Diverging somewhat from ambiguity, I offer a proposal: It’s not out of the realm of possibility that the government could fund an implement a similar neutral fact-checking service, staffed by people from all sides of the political spectrum. This service would clear up whether news is true – meaning accurate and beneficial – or false and/or harmful to regulate the media and ensure the public is not being exposed to disruptive ideas, without potentially falling victim to the biases a private business with private motivations is wont to.
Of course, limiting media has the potential to limit free speech, and there arises the question of how much of the information being put out there has to be factchecked. Just because satirical sources and ill-founded ideas can be misleading doesn’t mean they should be silenced outright. Regulations should be for publications and people posturing as ones perpetuating truth, not those existing for entertainment or general musings. A pragmatic alternative, then, could be to place regulations on the social media platforms most used by people requiring them to visibly flag their information as “news” vs “entertainment,” so that everyone who sees the posts being spread can tell at a glance whether they’ve been fact-checked per regulation (news) or should not necessarily be considered reputable (entertainment).