Zuckerberg-Chan To Do List

In a single day, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan can turn everything around.

Here’s how:

1. Hit the reset button hard. Announce that every penny of their personal philanthropy will be redirected to help society cope with digital technology. Focus the tens of billions they’ve pledged to give away on the challenges created by the technology they’ve promulgated.

2. Grow news and media literacy. Create a $5 billion New Literacy Foundation. Dedicate it to changing the way people on earth find, understand, create and act upon factual news and information. Fund a massive training program for teachers and librarians. Grow the best existing digital, media and news literacy programs. “Atomize” the core competencies of the new communications literacies and sprinkle their essence on every topic in every classroom. Create centers all over the world, including a big one at America’s museum of news, the Newseum. Goals: every child is news and media literate by the age of 12, and everyone can unlock the lifelong learning potential of digital media.

3. Support good journalism. Create a $5 billion New Journalism Fund, focused on startups reinventing local journalism in the United States in communities where it is being destroyed by private equity profiteers. Expand independent journalism. Support investigative reporting, transparency and community engagement, including through Report for America. Goal: the elimination of news deserts worldwide. American goal: every region in the U.S. has a major sustainable quality news outlet. Massively expand quality reporting on technology and science.

4. Fight to expand freedom. Create a $5 billion New Expression Fund, focused on reestablishing open government and open societies worldwide. Endow all major global projects working to free public information, expand rights of free expression and ensure the safety of journalists, librarians, educators and other truth-seekers in the marketplace of ideas. Grow freedom. Ensure people have a right to see and challenge digital information kept about them.

5. Help us deal with what’s coming. Create a $5 billion New Ethics Fund for artificial intelligence research as well as the building of news and media technology that uses AI in the public interest. Fund the creation of free detection software to combat the next generation of audio and video fakes being developed behind closed doors for military and commercial use. Fund the creation of AI-based systems to defend people from the daily cyberspace attacks from identity thieves. Develop AI ethics around everything from driverless cards to medical implants. China should not be the leading developer of AI.

6. Make media savvy a real cause. Endow ($5 billion) a public education campaign on the role and responsibilities of individuals, journalists, companies and governments in the new age of human communication. Link it to educational programming at all levels, from games and animated children’s shows up to “communication across the curriculum” at universities. Develop self-directed adaptive learning programs in every language. Campaign for all fact-based digital information providers to create, explain and live up to an information ethic.

Everyone has advice today for Zuckerberg and Chan. Why listen to mine? Because the world has entered a new age of human communication and is struggling, drowning. People hold the greatest personal media devices ever invented in their hands but really don’t know how to use them. We have entered a bizarre universe of alternative facts in which the greatest of scoundrels hide in plain sight. The education and ethics gaps are massive. Without facts, nothing else matters. The world will never solve its most pressing problems.

A total of $25 billion seems like a lot of money. But if you are trying to change the way one of the most important nations on the planet sees facts, journalism, literacy and ethics, it isn’t nearly enough. Still, it would be a good start. Experienced media philanthropists know there are more good ways to invest this money than there is money to invest.

Consider the consequences of not taking on this issue — a nation incapable of telling fact from fiction. What will that cost? Everything.

(For more, check out the Cronkite School’s News Co/Lab web site. Also, check out an opinion piece Steve Waldman wrote for the New York Times along similar lines a year ago. Disclosure: Facebook is a Co/Lab funder.)