So when I hear of some new bad thing like fake news, I immediately think of spam. And I think of the things that have been done to manage and mitigate spam. There is a roadmap for mitigating and managing this sort of thing. It seems like we need to replicate it around fake news. And we should.
Impressive how fast the problem of fake news descended on us. Maybe it’s been simmering, slowly increasing in temperature, but we didn’t notice because we were the frogs in the pot.
Well now it’s boiling.
Interesting to think of this as a tech problem in the same way email spam was attacked as a tech problem.
Another take is that the problem isn’t the distribution of fake news. It’s that we like it too much. We are lazy monkeys, with lazy monkey brains, and we are drawn to exciting, bias-confirming, ideas.
We get the same dopamine hit whether the news is accurate or 100% tapdancing-horseshit.
Email spam was a problem because we didn’t like it. News spam is a problem because we like it too much.