Today, I’m enjoying listening to one of the latest courses promoted on “The Great Courses Plus” – specifically,
Theories of Knowledge: How to Think about What You Know. It is a refreshing review of my philosophy courses in Epistemology. I am currently passively absorbing the lectures from this course as I research the topic. A really good quote I encountered is here in an opinion piece from The New York Times – “How to Fix Fake News“:
The article is a simple read – with a simple solution – one that calls to mind how eBay customers rate eBay sellers. The author proposes a “reliability marker” – a score that she points out is already being used by Facebook behind the scenes in their efforts to clean up “Fake News” – yet, she puts it this way –
People could choose to use social media the same way they do today, but now they’d have a choice whenever they encounter new information. They might glance at the reliability marker before nodding along with a friend’s provocative post, and they might think twice before passing on a weird story from a friend with a red reliability marker. Most important of all, a green reliability marker could become a valuable resource, something to put on the line only in extraordinary cases — just like a real-life reputation.
There’s technology behind this idea, but it’s technology that already exists. It’s aimed at assisting rather than algorithmically replacing the testimonial norms that have been regulating our information-gathering since long before social media came along. In the end, the solution for fake news won’t be just clever programming: it will also involve each of us taking up our responsibilities as digital citizens and putting our epistemic reputations on the line.
Who can argue with that?