The Internet quickly became the very thing we had all feared- anyone can say anything. Of course, this allowed the professional and insightful people to finally get the voice they deserve. However, it also allowed the ignorant and paranoid to have their say as well. We were wholly unprepared for the ensuing scope of damages to credible sources of information caused by an inability to tell the difference between the two. How can we fix this?
Of course, I have more than just a few ideas. Primarily, we need to understand that any information posted or promulgated is free speech, and is subject to the rights and responsibilities that status entails. The notable unprotected categories are obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, and commercial speech such as advertising.
The unprotected category that has moved into the harsh spotlight is fraud. It is generally considered statements or actions that are factually wrong, misleading, and unsubstantiated and outright lies. In the universe of computers, we see this kind of fraud all the time. It is dealt with everyday. Why do we have no products to insulate us from this vicious content outside of hard drives and memory address space?
As far as I can tell, every virus and piece of malware is delivered through fraud. It looks like a Word Document, a PDF, or is wrapped in an email full of lies about some delayed package delivery or an urgent password reset link. Lies, all of it. The anti-virus software makers have gone to great lengths to quickly and efficiently identify these lies, and stop it in it's tracks. There has been some progress in the App space to provide a similar experience for news aggregation. But it is not scalable enough to be useful on a broader scope of influence. The industry needs a nudge.
The chief offenders are often assumed to be the aggregators- Yahoo, Google, and the Social Media giants. None of them write the stories they wave around as tempting clickthroughs. The Social Media sites revel in engagement- the more comments, reactions, and cross-posts the better. Their motivation is not fact-sharing, it is reaction harvesting and sentiment analysis. These sites are deaf to fraud allegations because they are not authors, nor do they select what gets linked in their users' feeds.
The same can generally be said for Google and Yahoo, since their news comes from other sources. The only role for them is to source their news providers well, and limit the stable of potential websites to those that are actual news outlets that self-impose a truthfulness doctrine.
This leaves the seemingly millions of websites that claim to be news outlets, but are little more than armchair experts dreaming of advertising dollars. Driving ad impressions and clicks are their primary focus, and they will say or do anything to attract enough eyes to keep it going. In the news world, this is the functional equivalent of a side show barker promoting astounding oddities of nature, but delivering shams and fakes. It is still fraud.
I put forward the legal theory that such sites are in violation of the domain registrar's acceptable use agreement. Perpetrating fraud, inciting violence, and making false statements is certainly illegal activity. It is not protected speech as they wish to believe as they decry the evil specter of censorship. It is not censorship to prosecute slander, incitement, and treason.