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February 26, 2021
One natural response to fake news is to say that social media sites, web search providers, and news aggregators have a responsibility to identify fake news and stop it.
We need to recognize fake news as a profound problem that requires accountability and investment to solve.
This framework paints a dreary picture of our hopes for defeating fake news. The better we get at detecting and stopping it, the better we should expect propagandists to get at producing and disseminating it. That said, the only solution is to keep trying.
recognizing the importance of social effects on the spread and persistence of false beliefs, even if we assume that all individuals in a society are perfectly rational (which, alas, they are not), shows that whatever else we do, we also need to think about interventions that take networks into account.
Simply sharing more information with all members of such a group may not disrupt their conformity, but the more people in a network with access to reliable information, the more likely that someone will manage to buck the social trends.
The implication is that finding, targeting, and publicizing the views of a few individuals who are willing to go against the political and social consensus to spread true beliefs can have an outsized social effect.
It is even better if these individuals are (like politicians) highly connected. Those at the center of a star are under unusual pressure to conform, that is, not to play the maverick, but they also have considerable power to sway their peers when they decide to do so.
It is irresponsible to advocate for unsupported views, and doing so needs to be thought of as a moral wrong, not just a harmless addition to some kind of ideal “marketplace.”
it is still incumbent on scientists to take whatever measures they can to prevent their work from being used to do social damage.
scientific communities must adopt norms of publication that decrease the chances of spurious findings, especially in cases when the public good is clearly on the line. Second, scientists need to consider inherent risks when they publish.
low-powered studies are especially likely to generate spurious results. One solution is for scientific communities to raise their standards.
This strategy has the downside of suppressing contrary views, but that is also the point. If scientists work out disagreements ahead of time, they protect the public from those who would use dissent to sow confusion.
we must abandon industry funding of research.
Journalists, to minimize the social spread of false belief, need to hold themselves to different standards when writing about science and expert opinion. As we have argued, attempts at fairness often bias the scientific evidence seen by the public. Giving a “fair shake” to minority viewpoints in science can grant authority and power to fringe elements or downright bad actors.
the space allotted to the opinion relative to other such opinions—should be proportional both to the number of published articles in high-impact journals that support the view, and to the number of citations such articles have received, with more recent articles and citations given greater weight than older ones.
for instance, Google Scholar) can make it very easy to identify which articles are highly cited and which opinions are widely defended in reputable journals.
legislative frameworks should be extended to cover more general efforts to spread misinformation.
involve regulatory bodies in government as well as online sources whose entire purpose is to identify and block sources of misinformation.
Vulgar democracy is a “tyranny of ignorance”—or, given what we have argued here, a tyranny of propaganda.
Public beliefs are often worse than ignorant: they are actively misinformed and manipulated.
we would have if decisions about research priorities, methodological protocols, and ethical constraints on science were made via considered and informed deliberation among ideal and representative citizens able to adequately communicate and understand both the relevant science and their own preferences, values, and priorities.75 But as Kitcher is the first to admit, there is a strong dose of utopianism here: well-ordered science is what we get in an ideal society, free of the corrupting forces of self-interest, ignorance, and manipulation. The world we live in is far from this ideal. We may
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The challenge is to find new mechanisms for aggregating values that capture the ideals of democracy, without holding us all hostage to ignorance and manipulation.
