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Should a tool trying to fight fake news make any distinctions?

• intended 10y ago
  Insufficient resolution to Question, scope too broad. There's several levels to "truth". What happened. What an eyewitness/machine reported happened Whether the witness maliciously lied/mistakenly reported the event Was all of this reported faithfully Separately was reporting done to verify the facts. And do note, we've (coders) created the world where most newspapers have already gone out of business, and they have to in turn compete with everything and everyone for what remains of human attention spans. So the new question I would append to that list is - does it even matter anymore ? ProPublica for example tries very hard to do good in depth reporting. There have been reams of leaks with more data than what most people know what to do with. This has to compete for human attention bandwidth against documents/content designed to press buttons, elicit emotions and thus propagate (generating more page views, and so revenue) My point is simply that truth is a narrow view on the scope of the problem. In a year or two this will die down and a new generation of coders will parrot "move fast and break things." The larger system at play her must be front and center. Ideally people would have more time to reflect on their own - see more news that causes dissonance - hopefully causing people to check their opinions and beliefs. And of course the tool to Achieve this should itself not create a worse problem