Trump took to Twitter last weekend to declare that he would have won not just the presidency but also the popular vote had it not been for 3 million people — presumably undocumented immigrants — who came out to illegally vote against him. Because, you know, nothing attracts undocumented immigrants more than a polling place crawling with Trump supporters and local sheriffs. In what’s now becoming just another day in my industry, most major news outlets felt compelled to note in their headlines that Trump had made this allegation with zero evidence. Instead, he seems to have been citing yet another fabricated story that started on dubious news sites and quickly ricocheted into social media.
The emergence of “fake news” is a searing hot topic these days, as you’ve probably heard — a new, truth-free media to go with our new, truth-free politics. The Washington Post reports that a lot of these phony stories, some of which probably influenced the election in at least a tangential way, originate with Russian “bots” programmed to confuse American readers. (Payback, I guess, for all those years when Voice of America did the same thing.) Under enormous pressure, Facebook and Google have now promised to do a better job of curating the content that populates their sites. Which is all very comforting, if you really want software engineers assuming the role of civic arbiter that has traditionally fallen to journalists. I don’t.
And the problem with cracking down on social media sites is that it’s a little like the war on drugs. You can try to stamp out the supply of garbage news, but the Web is a vast place, and as long as someone can make money off misinformation, it will always find a crack through which to seep. No, the long-term solution here is about stemming the demand. The answer doesn’t lie in hectoring tech companies into policing content, but rather in teaching our kids how to consume it.
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