Part 2 – Fake News
In my piece ‘Fake News Checkers and Misplace Priorities’, I suggested we need to go beyond blanket condemnation of news outlets and instead, authenticate or condemn specific news stories. We have the technology. Immediately after the election, we heard about fake news authored by kids running junk websites. Just three and a half months ago, even Zuckerberg was still blowing it off. Fast-forward just a few months ahead to now. Accusations of fake news are flying both ways in a manner not unlike a full-scale high school cafeteria food fight. Big news calls Trump and conservative news fake. Trump calls major news outlets fake. It’s our current obsession and hysteria. The biggies like Google and Facebook are unleashing programs and algorithms to vet news and censor it. We need to catch up with this because it’s turning into 1984 unchecked and at an alarming rate.
Anyone with a smart phone has probably noticed that you can have a conversation, mention a specific thing, open you phone, and see a placed ad for that product. It happens with such regularity now that I just accept it as an unadvertised reality. Search engines can scour and read petabytes of written material. AI versions can now parse through video, voice, employ face recognition of photos, and scour billions of social media accounts. The Internet mind sees all. One can argue that only Facebook, Google, and Amazon hold the keys to this kingdom and that its still one-way exploitation, but really, everything is available for a price. Are you hearing me Koch Bros.? If you can’t find the programs here, I hear foreign programmers are also giving us a run for the money.
So why are civil activist still depending on clown organizations with dubious credentials to tell us if news is fake or real? Why is USA Today running headlines that suggest a Trump statement may be false? This is ludicrous. Let me propose a solution. The left can hire search ‘spider’ robots and the right can do the same. The moment Trump, Pelosi, Ryan, Spicer, Schumer, or anyone on high opens their mouth, the mind digests those words, runs it’s search algorithm, then produces a table of statements, citation, and annotations. This table is automatically posted. The public compares and contrasts competing bots results and makes their own educated analysis. In this day and age, no editorial board should ever have an excuse to run speculative headlines about the veracity of someone’s statements. If anything, they should just cut to the quick and run their editorial piece. No news orgs need to harmed in the making of news or attack other news orgs. No censorship necessary, which is how we are quickly evolving.
Web-media news is like a virus, highly adaptable and both side will persist whether they’re telling the truth or half truths, but it’s not in the public’s best interest for one half of media organizations to be driven to the dark-web to get their story out. Sure, that’s an extreme scenario, and it could happen to either side right now. Both options are quite dystopian. We have the technology to avoid this and we only need leadership to make it happen.
