I understand the following item is about “false news” or “fake news”, but I prefer my Arts Editors’ name for it: Lies. From CNN:
A suspect arrested Sunday with an assault rifle at a Washington, DC pizzeria admitted he had come to investigate an online conspiracy theory, Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department said Sunday evening in a statement.
Police have identified him as 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch of Salisbury, North Carolina.
“During a post arrest interview this evening, the suspect revealed that he came to the establishment to self-investigate ‘Pizza Gate’ (a fictitious online conspiracy theory),” the police department said in a statement.
“Pizza Gate” is a name given to the online false news stories begun last month that charged the Comet Ping Pong restaurant and its owner were involved in a child sex operation. The owner has vehemently denied the charges, but they continued to proliferate online. The owner and employees said they were repeatedly threatened on social media.
Fake news has always been with us, but computers and the internet are great multipliers, as I’ve said before. Now, CNN has published an allied article on how to be a responsible news reader and sharer here. But is that really the route to go, to make everyone responsible for vetting their news sources? The use of these sites to persecute individuals for political or commercial reasons may eventually lead to the abandonment of those sites, if enough shame is flung at those who make the mistake – honest or not – of believing and propagating the news found on those sites. If they become ineffectual, then they’ll go away.
And that’s why fact-checking sites such as Snopes keeps lists of untrustworthy sites. But will that be good enough? I have to wonder if we’re going to see a slow, but real migration from the great mish-mash of news sites we see today to a core of sites that are consistently trustworthy, until it just about looks like the 1960s – just a few organizations with good reputations and large news staffs, perhaps charging for access, in place of the advertising model. After all, if there are consequences for propagating false news lies,then folks will seek out real news.
