Depending on whom you choose to believe, the problem of fake news on Facebook is either one of the most important issues currently facing mankind, or an over-blown controversy pumped up by the mainstream media. And in a way, that dichotomy itself points out the problem with defining — let alone actually getting rid of — so-called “fake news.”
When someone uses that term, they could be referring to one of a number of different things: It might be a story about how Bill and Hillary Clinton murdered several top-level Washington insiders, or it might be one about how Donald Trump’s chief adviser is a neo-Nazi, or it might be one about how the really important issue of the election was Clinton’s emails.
The first of these is relatively easy to disprove just by using facts. The second is somewhat more difficult to rebut, since a lot of it is based on innuendo or implication. And the third is almost impossible to respond to because it is pure opinion.
As John Herrman argued in a recent piece in the New York Times, part of the difficulty in solving the “fake news” problem stems from the fact that many people appear to have lost faith in the existing media. Therefore, much of the fact-checking and analysis that newspapers and others have done on Donald Trump wound up being largely irrelevant.
Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017
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