COMMENT | Cracking the code to cut back misinformation

COMMENT | The year 2016 was a watershed year for misinformation. Much of the world looked on with fear and horror as the UK voted in favour of Brexit, Donald Trump was elected 45th President of the United States and Cambridge Analytica was revealed to be manipulating our data on Facebook to sway those elections.

According to media think-tank Data & Society, “weaponisation of the digital influence machine” had taken place.

The horror gave rise to a flurry of “solutions” to the problem of misinformation. But people wanted to take action before they actually knew what precisely the problem was and what would work.

The intervening years have allowed us time to assess which of those responses was more effective and the advantages of each. And how the world moves in a decentralised way to combat problems like these as they arise.

Among the many solutions proposed were ideas such as fact checking units in newsrooms, greater support for quality journalism, adjusting social media algorithms to promote quality journalism, regulation to crack down on platforms sharing misinformation, and content moderation.

At least nine different ways of tackling the problem, with countless variations, have been floated and implemented since 2016. The proliferation of solutions reflects the approach of the people proposing them.

For example, journalists always think the solution to every problem is more journalism. Some journalists believed that if they’d written more articles, better articles, about the problem of the tech companies and misinformation, the problem would never have arisen.

Europeans tend to believe in regulation so their proposals were more regulatory. The US, meanwhile, has an aversion to government regulation so their response was that the tech companies should solve their own problems.

Everybody believes that what they do is the right thing which is part of why we saw very different solutions.

We’ve also learned since then that different financial interests are involved. Social media platforms make money from engagement and so have no incentive to highlight worthy information that doesn’t travel. They make money from...