Fake News is Spam

Jojo -

20 years ago, "advertisers" discovered that they could scrape the web for valid email addresses and send "advertisements" directly to customers, for free. What probably started out as an honest marketing exercise turned into a hellhole of scams and shady pharmaceutical sales. It also spawned a cottage industry of Spam filtering software. First using a combination of simple text filters and blacklists, it eventually morphed into an arms race between variations of the word "Viagra" and some of the biggest tech companies of the day. Eventually, the battle was won. The spam fighters were just successful enough to keep email usable for everyone. Marketing email did not die. It simply matured and now relies on gatekeepers to ensure that advertisers act ethically. Every advertiser now has to manage their reputation with the various spam filters to avoid getting blocked.

Now, we are presented with a similar problem. Individuals with a financial incentive (provided by Google Ads) create worthless, misleading content that appeals to the biases of specific segments of the population, prompting them to share the content, putting it in front of more eyeballs. People click on the fake news, and even if they see through the ruse, the fake news site gets ad impressions.

Luckily, we already fought this battle, and we have the technology. Here are my steps to fix it:

  • Facebook needs to allow users to flag articles as "Fake or Misleading." Reports like this will count against the originating domain. When the domain receives a certain number of negative reports, Facebook can have one of their employees examine the site and determine if it's truly fake, or being reported for ideological reasons. Domains with a bad reputation can be hell-banned, where only the original poster can see it, stopping its spread.
  • Google needs to implement a similar feature through its advertising platform. If a user sees a fake article with Google Ads attached, they should be able to report that article back to Google. Google can then take look at domains with large numbers of negative reports and take action to remove advertising from those domains.
  • Real news organizations need to cite their sources. I see so many re-posted news articles with oblique references to where the news was originally reported. This is the internet. You're allowed to link offsite. Link to the AP source you based your article on. I swear that half of the "real news" online is just repackaged crap from another source. It needs to be easier to track down whether an article is true. You can't bank on your reputation when there's this much partisan distrust in the air.
  • We need to pay for online news. The great experiment failed. Advertising cannot carry the industry and allow it to keep its integrity intact. If news organizations can afford to have actual staff again, we might see more effort put into reporting.

This puts a large burden on Facebook and Google that might be seen, from a financial perspective, to be not in their best interest. It's going to need a moral choice from the top to assign resources to this problem.