Norman Lear recently penned a guest essay for The Hollywood Reporter on the rise of fake news. Here in an excerpt:
"'Fake news' sounds like the satire of The Onion or the brilliant performance art of Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert. Everyone is in on the joke, and that kind of 'fake news' can bring us to new perspectives and a greater understanding of ourselves and our world. But the kind of malicious or purely mercenary false news stories we've seen in recent months is something else entirely: hoaxes designed to attract viewers that grievously misled voters in this critical election.
...Why do people fall for this stuff? It seems to have something to do with the way our social media networks are constructed. We're more likely to pay attention to the final source of an article — the person who calls it to our attention — than to the original source. With sites like Facebook feeding us self-selected and self-reinforcing media, we begin to have a real problem.
That's especially true given the outsized megaphones wielded by celebrities and politicians, who can reach millions of people with a single blog post or tweet. If they, like our incoming president, the ultimate celebrity-politician, don't give a damn about the credibility of the source they're retweeting, truth doesn't stand a chance.
...It's hard to know how to deal with the prevalence of misinformation in a society in which we revere freedom of expression. There are a lot of smart people working on technical ways for companies such as Google and Facebook to identify sites that peddle hoax news and warn readers about them — and deny them ad revenue. But there is a bigger civic challenge facing all of us.
A recent study by researchers at Stanford University evaluated the ability of middle school, high school and college students to distinguish between actual news, bogus news and advertising in the media they consume online. The result: 'bleak.' It is clear this problem is not restricted to the young, and we join the researchers in their worry that democracy itself is 'threatened by the ease at which disinformation about civic issues is allowed to spread and flourish.'..."
Read the full (and more political) version at The Hollywood Reporter.
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