a post by Fiona McCarthy for DEMOS
In today’s political landscape, online misinformation is treated like any other lie: someone tells a lie, the lie spreads, someone else corrects it, and we all move on.
This is most evident in the proposed solutions to the crisis.
Tech giants like Google and Youtube have launched efforts to filter search results by accuracy or annotate potentially false content; news outlets now have dedicated regular coverage to fact-checking; and lawmakers in both the US and UK have proposed legislation to designate social media sites as media companies rather than platforms, thereby making them liable for the spread of false information on their sites.
None of these are terrible options, but none would completely solve the misinformation crisis because they’re aimed at countering specific lies. It’s just that the misinformation problem isn’t simply a crisis of specific lies – it’s a crisis of how misinformation hijacks the entire political conversation.
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