How Crowds Can Save The Internet from Misinformation
As a factchecker at PolitiFact, I factchecked for Facebook and TikTok, where I was one of a small number of factcheckers up against mountains of misinformation we couldn’t possibly hope to check in our lifetimes. And even if we could, do users really want a world where large corporations use a shadowy process to determine what is true? The same thing that makes the Internet great also makes it messy: No one is in charge. Gone are the days when a small number of trusted newspapers reported what was happening. Today, many people get their news from social media, where a post published by the New York Times looks a lot like a status update from your grandmother. The twentieth century had smaller numbers of trained journalists. The twenty-first century now has billions of untrained ones. The power of billions of continuous online updates has made the news more available than ever before. This same torrent of information also means that misinformation is just as available. On the flip side, billions of stories, factual or not, are spun up, syndicated, and posted on social media every day, too much for platforms to monitor for accuracy.Ideally, to counter this threat, everyone would learn the media literacy tools that factcheckers like me have been using for over a century to figure out what’s true. But even if everyone did learn to factcheck, who has time to scrutinize everything they come across online?
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