Google Executives Are Floating a Plan To Fight Fake News on Facebook and Twitter (qz.com)

Fake news, bots, and propaganda were hot topics at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos last month, and Google executives there floated an intriguing idea to some fellow attendees -- what if the company could tell users whether information is trustworthy before they shared it on social networks like Facebook and Twitter? From a report: Representatives from Google and its parent company Alphabet eagerly discussed how the company can play a greater role in reducing misleading information online, several Davos attendees involved in and briefed on these conversations told Quartz. A notification system, perhaps via an optional extension for Google's Chrome browser, was an idea that these people said was broached more than once. Such a browser-based system controlled by Google could alert users on Facebook's or Twitter's websites when they're seeing or sharing a link deemed to be false or untrustworthy. Right now, this appears to be merely an idea company executives are discussing, not a product in development.

Comments

Re:Liberal Billionaires

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you talking about like the left's pet theory about some sort of Russian influence on the Presidential election, which they still can't produce any evidence for? Or maybe you're talking about their efforts to normalize a mental disorder called gender dysphoria by claiming gender is not biological (as if nature/God/deity asks you whether you'd like a penis or vagina before birth). Maybe you're talking about the left's absolute refusal to accept the reality of racial disparities in anything not being the result of a vast white conspiracy? Somehow I doubt you're talking about any of those. I suspect what you mean is that when people will not entertain your delusions, you believe facts no longer matter.

Seems to me the only solution...

[ThomasBHardy]

Is to start placing bounties on sites that run fake news.

In today's news market, it's a series of programs deciding what to put on your pages. Highly tailored to fit into your bubble of chosen topics and viewpoints.

So place a bounty on fake news like a bug bounty. For the sake of discussion, let's call it a $5,000 penalty for running a fake story. The bounty goes to whomever first proves it's fake with checkable facts and sources. The bounty is paid by the site that displayed the story.

Now you have incentivised folks to think about the news, and to dig into the correctness of stories. At the same time you have incentivised sites to stop posting fake news. This will also spawn a cottage industry of folks who become very good at fact checking and maybe we'll find a few companies we can trust.

Start off with a bounty value, and keep raising it until the desired results are met,