Fake News has recently become a widely discussed topic thanks to the abundance of it this past election cycle. There have been studies to test how hard it is to discern it from real news. We hear about it all the time from our fearless leader’s social media accounts.
People have been shot over it. The danger of fake news doesn’t lie in its ability to get people to believe it, or even be shot over it. Those instances are more preventable than the real issue.
The problem with fake news is that it eventually everyone will just assume that all news is fake. Then they’ll stop following news all together. Everyone becomes an uninformed voter. Congress approval ratings are already incredibly low at 16%. Could they brake the record low of 9%? Or would they possibly go up because no one would know what was happening in Washington? Movements and protests don’t work if no one knows why they’re protesting or even that there is a protest going on.
In an almost ironic fashion, the more Fake News is discussed by traditional news outlets, the more people will think that whatever they’re reading might be fake news and therefore tune it out. The public’s trust in news media is already at an all time low. We are on a dangerous path.
So how do we fix it? The simple answer is to ask people to remain vigilant and not fall into the easy trap of apathy. I believe there has to be some form of technical solution to this problem. (Fair warning, there is about to be a lot of oversimplification so take all of this with a grain of salt and do some research on your own.) WikiLeaks uses a checksum system on their documents. To put it simply, they “lock” the document and make the “key” available to the public so they can confirm it wasn’t replaced by some other document on its way to you. This helps verify the information the author wants you to see is seen, but not the authenticity of the author. Bitcoin uses block-chain technology to keep a record of transactions. Using a similar checksum, each transaction is able to be verified by the community. What if we replaced citations with a block-chain to track how often an author was cited? Authors could post their “citation-chains” to build their reputation as a valid source and the readers would be able verify that they aren’t faking. That helps with the authenticity of the source issue, but that likely won’t be enough. People are still apathetic and likely wouldn’t verify the information themselves. Luckily while these authenticity tokens are hard to fake, they’re easy to verify. So we can make an automated way to verify them and build it right into a browser. These are just brainstorming ideas, but we need to get the conversation started because one blog isn’t enough to solve the issue of mass false information. What do you think is the solution to Fake News? How can we prevent the dark ages of mass media?
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