Fake News and Our Responsibilities
This week we talked about cyber war, cyber conflict, and cyber crime. While definitions might remain in flux, it’s still pretty easy to tell when you’ve been ripped off through cyber crime or attacked in an online manner. I’d like to focus here on what we’ve learned is harder to understand: When have I been fed fake news? In the aftermath of our country’s recent presidential election, many are asking if the citizens of the United States were too lax about “fake news” being distributed to us through our social networks and especially around our comfort in getting our “news” from Twitter and Facebook.
With calls from many corners for Facebook to fix the problem of fake news, Mark Zuckerberg recently posted his thoughts on how Facebook might help combat misinformation. I agree with Mr. Zuckerberg that this is a hard problem and I was glad to see him say that he doesn’t want Facebook “to be arbiters of truth [themselves],” but I was not impressed with the ideas he threw out. Then again, I wasn’t surprised since Facebook believes that “[t]he goal of News Feed is to connect people to the stories that matter most to them.” If you start with the goal of making people happy and not with the goal of presenting what the person should know about what’s going on in our nation (or the world), you’re not going to be too interested in addressing fake news.
Perhaps we should try to agree what the problem actually is. I personally like Stephen Colbert’s comment about fake news. In a recent event with his pal, John Oliver, reported by the NYT, Colbert said, “What we did was fake news. We got on TV and we said: ‘This is all going to be fake. We’re going to make fun of news.’” Colbert went on to say, “The fact that they call this stuff fake news upsets me, because this is just lying.”
The media calls it “fake news.” Zuckerberg calls it “misinformation.” Colbert calls it “lying.” The truth is that what we decide to post on our news feeds and what Facebook decides to distribute to our news feeds is just free speech. The problem starts when we chose to believe that our Facebook news feed or our Twitter feed is all that we need to know.
Criminals are out there trying to rip us off. Terrorists and agents of enemy states are out there trying to disrupt our way of life. We need to remember that democracies function when their citizens take it upon themselves to be informed. We have a free press because the founders of our country didn’t trust the government to feed us the truth. If we didn’t want to trust our government to fed us the truth, why do we now trust our social media feeds to provide us with everything we need to know? I don’t think it is solely Mr. Zuckerberg’s job to police our news feed. It is our job as citizens to seek the truth in what we get through our social media. It won’t be easy, but neither is preserving our democracy for our children.