Ryan Waddington
1 min readDec 7, 2016

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Thought provoking. But I don’t think people like Eric are the real problem. He made an innocent (maybe naive?) mistake. It’s the sites that are doing it on purpose and the people that believe what they want to believe, no matter how ridiculous that are the real problem. HRC running a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor basement? Anyone who believes that and then picks up a gun to go “investigate” is not going to be swayed by a low “truth” score issued by PolitiFact. And what is to keep the Fake News sites from creating a Fake Truthfulness Score, Truth Prize, etc. to fool those who are at least trying to sift out fake from real? I think your ideas will help, but fundamentally we have to create a society where thoughtfulness, critical thinking and objectivity are core values, and where ideas that don’t jibe with one’s world view can still be valid and those that do can still be invalid. As a technology optimist I hope there are technology solutions that can help with this, but it feels like more of a task for our non-media institutions like schools, churches and community organizations than for the media.

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