The Way to Fight Fake News is Real News
The Way to Fight Fake News is Real News
MONIKA BAUERLEIN
Mother Jones
Until not terribly long ago, there were a few basic rules for success in the news business. One was that publishing verifiably false information would drive audiences away. If you made stuff up, people would cancel your paper or stop watching your network. Media companies practiced basic quality assurance not because they were deeply ethical, but because their bottom line depended on it.
But for platforms like Facebook, the key is not the credibility of the news we see, since they don't produce it. Their success depends on getting us to engage, share, and stick around, which means making sure that there's plenty in our feeds to warm our heart or get us outraged—whether that's a deeply reported exposé or a cruel hoax is a second-order concern.
In their heyday, legacy media left out a lot, mischaracterized a lot, allowed themselves to be taken for a ride (all the way to war). But every day, newspapers and television networks also told us a few things about our politics that had gone through basic vetting—and it was understood that they had. "If it's on the news, it must be true" felt naïve, even foolish at the time, but now we know it represented a social contract far more fragile than we realized. We had an agreement, among a wide swath of society, that news media constituted an acceptable mechanism for sorting fact from fiction.
This year, that agreement finally collapsed.
Can we fix this? Yes—but we can't (nor should we want to) go back to a world where media corporations served as our political referee by dint of controlling the distribution of news. We're going to need some other way to establish what we agree on. Some of that will involve technological fixes and artificial intelligence; some will be about the marketplace; and some of it will be about all of us taking part.
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