What to do about 'fake news'

At the turn of century I explained the rise of the extreme Right and fundamentalist religion as being caused by having too much information. I felt people were overwhelmed with so much information that they threw up their hands in frustration and fell back on listening to people they had historically trusted to make decisions for them such as their ministers and local politicians. They retreated to a formula that worked for their grandparents in a time when there wasn't enough good information. Simple systems are easy to maneuver in.

But now we have not only too much information we have purposefully false information amplified by social media networks. The result is the election of Donald Trump, a simple and distorted result from simple and distorted information.

Democracy may not be able to exist in the midst of this kind of noise. The use of the internet to amplify, distort and echo these distorted opinions has caused so much sound in the arena of politics that it is no longer possible to sort truth from propaganda.

This is the biggest issue in politics currently. Is it bigger than health care or the expanding budget deficit or the impeachment of Trump? Yes. Because unless it is resolved there may be no way for most Americans to make good decisions because the information stream is so polluted with misinformation that no one without a personal fact checker can sort it out. And, if Americans can't make good decisions about candidates and issues, then we are headed downhill in this experiment to rule ourselves in a democratic system.

To make good decisions American need good information. Good information consists of accurate facts.

Today in the Washington Post Leonard Pitts wrote:

We have to decide now that truth has no political party, and reality matters. We have to support responsible news outlets. We have to recognize that facts exist not to support our biases, but to shape our reasoning. The alternative is a near future of chaos and decline. And the clock is ticking. So in the big picture, it matters little whether any action we take is too much or too little.We better hope it’s not too late.

In The New Yorker recently Jill Lepore wrote:

"High crimes and misdemeanors" does have a meaning. An impeachable offense is an abuse of the power of the office that violates the public trust, runs counter to the national interest, and undermines the Republic. To that words are meaningless is to give up on truth. To believe that Presidents can do anything they like is to give up on self-government.

In an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, Aaron Sorkin who wrote the movie "The Social Network" wrote:

I get a lot of use out of the First Amendment. Most important, it’s a bedrock of our democracy and it needs to be kept strong. But this can’t possibly be the outcome you and I want, to have crazy lies pumped into the water supply that corrupt the most important decisions we make together. Lies that have a very real and incredibly dangerous effect on our elections and our lives and our children’s lives.

Forty percent of Americans say they get news from Facebook yet Zuckerberg refuses to monitor the truth of statements posted under his letterhead. What is to be done? Elizabeth Warren bought an ad on Facebook that said that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook were supporting Trump for president; a statement she knew was not true. It was broadcast through Facebook more than a 1000 times. Facebook refused to remove it because they denied it was their responsibility. What if the New York Times refused to accept responsibility for statements under their letterhead?
Perhaps Elizabeth Warren is right and Facebook needs to be broken up into smaller units if it not going to monitor the damage it is doing to democracy.

America needs reliable, factual information. Vanessa Otero's website Ad Fontes Media (https://www.adfontesmedia.com). monitors truth and bias in new organizations. My advice which I pass along to people who seem confused by the noise is to not use social media for news and to use sources from Ad Fontes which are rated as neutral and accurate. We can live with the internet as long as we learn how to use it.