The erosion of faith in information is a challenge to those, such as PSA, who would seek to enable useful quality communication between people in pursuit of goals such as learning, healthcare, and effective public services. We are in the midst of a period where online veracity is under attack by state agents, and others, with the goal of discrediting our cloud communication tools.
Here’s an article that sketches out some of the breadth and depth of the “fake” information problem, along the lines of other recent postings here. The hope is that by understanding the challenge to our communication channels, and to their reliability and veracity, it becomes unmistakably evident that we need new ways of exchanging and curating information online.
One potential solution is to move away from anonymity online…which would make it easier to track down “fake” sources, and would make it notably harder to escape accountability for trolling and spreading false and untrue information.
OTOH, it would also inhibit communication in areas of the world subject to totalitarian control of what “can be said”, and attempts to organize politically in countries with limited civil rights, and give rise to new concerns over our own government security machine exceeding their legal mandates for “spying” on our own citizens.
But perhaps that is the price we would have to pay to save our communication revolution from becoming a “tower of babel”. Or maybe some other solutions will be invented to a problem that has been here all along…what happens if there’s fundamentally no way to reliably distinguish between trolls and truth in online communication.
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Russian-propaganda-effort-helped-spread-‘fake-news’-during-election-experts-say-The-Washington-Post.pdf”]