Reading 10: You Can’t Handle the Truth!
You can’t handle the truth!
Well, maybe you could handle the truth, but you might find out that you’ll have a hard time finding it.
Why’s that, you ask? If you’re one of the everyone in the United States that goes online quite often, and even uses it as a source to find out what’s happening in the world, you’ll probably encounter a whole lot of information that is not quite true. To be more specific, this could range anywhere from slightly factually inaccurate to a completely fabricated and made up story about how the Pentagon has been leaking chemicals from a “gay bomb” into the water supply and is converting frogs into homosexuals.
Yes, we are entering the dangerous realm of “fake news”.
As is expressed in the article regarding Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, fake news simply refers to untruthful information that often occurs online and is typically portrayed as as actual news. Additionally, fake news may or may not be malicious. As in the article referenced above, and also the case of Myanmar, the fake news uses hateful and even violent rhetoric and is naturally extremely malicious. However, fake news need not be so sinister. Fake news could also be spread just because the fake news story seems exciting and interesting and so people are curious to read it.
The type of fake news and the motivations behind it greatly impact its effect and how harmful it should be viewed as. No fake news is entirely harmless as even the fake news designed simply to be click-bait wastes people’s time in an attempt to earn traffic to their site.
This is as good as fake news gets. Much of the fake news on the internet is much worse than that. Plenty of fake news exists to spread blatant untruths that will incite violence or hatred.
Technology companies, including social media and content aggregators, certainly have a role to play in working to fight against fake news. Facebook, for example, has already made some attempt to curtail fake news, but certainly is a long way from being on top of the issue. Additionally, it is difficult to understand how much these tech companies should be allowed to do.
On one hand, the current state of social media is unacceptable in how it is being used to spread dangerous and hateful content. However, on the other hand, allowing dominant social media and search platforms to fully curate and filter the content we see on the internet is potentially harmful as well.
Such companies aren’t going to be able to completely stop the proliferation of fake news. However, we can certainly demand that companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google do a better job to prevent hateful and violence-inciting content from appearing on their platforms. This should be the sort of baseline expectations of these companies.
With that said, I do think social media companies should go a step further in attempting to better ensure the veracity of content on their websites. Unfortunately, the digital world has allowed a deluge of information and stories online that has ultimately spurred an information war (which UW professor Kate Starbird believes we are losing, and I have to agree). This information war is leading assault on our political institutions. While it will be near impossible to ever tell if fake news had a decisive impact on the 2016 election, it’s very difficult to deny that it did play a role and a had an effect of some degree. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at University of Pennsylvania, makes a very compelling argument that Russia did gift Trump the presidency in her book, as was mentioned in this week’s reading from The New Yorker on the same subject.
While there may be danger in allowing these large tech firms to censor information and define “fake” in terms of their content, these companies are in the best position to stop untruthful claims.
A couple of potential solutions come to mind to me. For one, tech companies could partner with fact checking services such as PolitiFact or Snopes to help check the veracity of claims on their sites. The other surely less popular and almost certainly less feasible option would be to push for the creation of a nonpartisan government organization in charge of holding companies accountable for their role in spreading fake news and also attempting to limit this proliferation of fake news.
In my own experience, I found that my Facebook and Twitter feeds are not overrun with fake news, but certainly have some (Twitter more so than Facebook). While I am not surprised to encounter it, I do wish it was something I had more power to prevent from occurring on my feed. I do often flag posts that checkout to be fake news, but this does not at all prevent fake news from appearing on my feed.
However, I don’t often use Facebook and Twitter and I certainly do not use it as a source of news, but that does not mean I don’t encounter fake news. Instead, I frequently receive headlines from my AP and CNN apps as well as browse my Google News feed to find new stories. While mostly free from fake news, I do occasionally see such stories make in onto my feed.
Pivoting slightly, I find the filter bubble discussion interesting. My Google News feed actually does a pretty decent job of breaking me from my bubble. I’m quite liberal in my beliefs, but I somewhat often find stories from Fox News and National Review on my feed. However, I find that reading them often does not help to moderate me. In fact, when I read stories that have a political bias far to the right, I think they often either reaffirm my beliefs or push my farther to the left. Talking to some of my friends with a similar political disposition as me, they seem to feel the same way.
You probably could handle the truth, but maybe you can’t handle fake news, because I know I can’t.
