> "Fake news detectors" just sounds like a way to abrogate the responsibility of the individual to understand and analyze sources. It's not a good idea to menta

> "Fake news detectors" just sounds like a way to abrogate the responsibility of the individual to understand and analyze sources. It's not a good idea to mentally outsource this kind of critical thinking. People have little time. A lie reaches many more people than its subsequent retraction, and this is the case even for mainstream news. If the individual has a responsibility to be reasonable and skeptical, distributors of information have a responsibility too. This isn't about censoring stories, but adding fact-check links to articles, the same way you could have a browser extension that tells you if an article has been discussed on HN before. It adds more info and doesn't remove any. Facebook, Google and others just recognize that an informed population is essential to democracy. If you were trying to weaken or subvert democracy (either as a political radical, or an adversary nation state), you would do it by spreading FUD which sows distrust and conflict. It's in everybody's interest that the facts be accurately represented in public discourse. Just as the solution is always more speech, not less, here the solution to flawed or biased fact-checking is more fact-checking, not less. Edit: want to add that fact-checking is journalism's necessary and inevitable response to a rise in non-conglomerate journalism. Before, it was just the radio or newspapers, so they were mostly held to a certain standard. Now, anyone can spread news. You can't have asymmetry like that without a justified response from news orgs.