Before the printing press, people couldn't really judge sources either, because there was generally only one source. That's quite a bit different than having ma

Before the printing press, people couldn't really judge sources either, because there was generally only one source. That's quite a bit different than having many sources of wildly different quality hidden behind many layers of social media sharing, all reporting second- and third-hand content. I'm not advocating government control, but that's definitely where Trump is heading with his "FAKE NEWS media... is the enemy of the American People!"[1] He's trying to go down the path of many tyrants, discrediting all sources of information except for those run by or blessed by the state. The way content is distributed today, with so much noise and so little clarity, directly feeds into Trump's agenda that it's all illegitimate except for the sources that he's personally vouching for. I don't really know what the solution might be. Google's been able to develop very good algorithms for identifying spam, mostly in email but also in Google Voice and their web search results. They've also got pretty good classifiers that can automatically tag content. Maybe Facebook, Twitter, and other sharing sites need that kind of algorithm to tag everything that's posted. Fake news would have a much harder time getting distributed if it had a big "FAKE" label applied to it. The devil's in the details though; we already know how Facebook's Like buttons get gamed, and we wouldn't want that for tagging. Tagging should be showing you the information you don't want to know, but need to know. [1] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/832708293516632065 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/83270829351663206...