Strategies to Fight Fake News

While researching the current state of the news world, I’ve been drawn to the noble core of journalism. We all have some idea what journalists are supposed to do. They should gather facts, develop sources, get interviews, and ask tough questions only to turn around write stories that draw people in so they can hear the vital whisper of truth, which is the ultimate moving target.

To dig deeper, I started reading The Elements of Journalism by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel. In this book, the authors explore journalism by talking to many, many people from inside and outside the news industry. One quote stood out to me as I begin Project Corgi.

The central purpose of journalism is to tell the truth so that people will have the information that they need to be sovereign. — Jack Fuller, then president of the Tribune Publishing Company, which produces the Chicago Tribune.

Truth is what I want to support so I turned my attention to fact checking, which has grown in importance as trust has eroded in the media. In the US, sites like PolitiFact and FactCheck.org are addressing stories appearing in mass media and social media by following rigorous verification standards and process.

One thing I’ve noticed about these sites is that they call out lies no matter the political affiliation of the purveyor. Though not sufficient to be trusted, this is easy to check yourself and wouldn’t be the case if the sites and organizations who manage them had a political agenda.

If a story you see is questionable this infographic can help you determined whether to trust it or not. You could always submit it to one of the above fact checkers if you were so inclined.

Getting back to the project, I want to share some strategies to improve each layer of the media to better support verifiable truth.

• Creator level — encourage creators to cryptographically sign their content, as close to the moment of creation as possible. This is not as hard as it sounds.
• Content level — augment and extend public content archives (e.g. Internet Archive) so that news has the finer-grained tracking in time and content
• Publication level — help publishers manage keys and sign their content before publishing
• Social media level — decorate social media posts with signatures and work toward signatures being a standard side-car to all content
• End-user level — improve tooling so citizens can verify more of what they read, request publications sign content, and build decentralized reputation to scale news validation

No doubt it will take years to move the needle on any of these, not to mention that there’s no clear starting point. If you were coming from the tech side, would you start?