Fakes News and A New Life Philosophy


When I worked on Reuters Tracer for a little bit, one of the hot item topics during that time is detecting Fake News. Fake News is a real issue for people wanting reliable information and data. People who want reliable information and data are often decision makers, who need to take action.
I tried to look into what is "Fake News" which lead me to a new life philosophy. This new philosophy - is a moral imperative to check every information we consume before we believe because beliefs are the basis of our action. In this day and age that everyone is streamed with information all day thru social media, adoption of this philosophy becomes a necessity.

Why does anyone want to create "Fake News"?
 The short answer to this is to win people over. "Fake News" mostly appeal to the target audience emotions. You can't win people over with logic, facts, and data. Have you ever been riled up to work harder when presented with charts and graphs of our earnings?
Majority of "Fake News" is communicated in order to evoke two major emotions FEAR or HOPE.
Sample Fear: "Muslim Refugee Kills Texas County Deputy"
Sample Hope: "Homeless man"

Evoking emotions from people is a great way to lead people to believe and act for your cause. Engaging this way for your cause results in highly devoted and dedicated people. This strategy is employed by some terrorist organizations. Why would a person act for an organization's cause that will lead to certain death?  It is not logical, not based on facts. We can also see this from new technology startups. Startup employees who are emotionally involved with the company's cause that they would almost work for nothing. In short, is this how you mobilize people to act.

Knowing this, it is really important to detect "Fake News", convince people that it is "Fake" and ultimately have people not believe "Fake News". We need to prevent people from acting on false information. It also does not help that "Fake News" is a growing industry (The fake news machine: Inside a town gearing up for 2020). We better get a handle on it soon.

So we come to this question: "Would we be able to detect Fake News?",
"Once detected, How would we convince people not to believe "Fake News?

Would we be able to detect Fake News?

In order to detect "Fake News" we need evidence. Where would we get evidence?
- Search Engines
    Search engines like Google are known to have bias results. It is based on what they wanted you to see (for commercial gain - Google Products).
- Social Media
     Can we rely on the number of times that people share a news story? Can sharing indicate that people believe a story to be true? Does that mean a lot more people looked at evidence about the story? Or is this a good indication to look for more evidence about the shared story?
- Reliable News Sources
   Organizations whose main business is to gather the truth about a news story. CNN? WP? NYT? - Do they have their own biases? 

Once we have collected evidence. We know for a fact that people would still believe "Fake News" even though the evidence suggests otherwise - why?
- They are not compelled to look at the evidence
- Not motivated to find out the truth
- Established belief systems

So even if we have evidence people would still believe "Fake News" - why not approach it from the news story and the people who read it? Collect data about the news then collect data from people who read the fake news.

But what kind of data should we collect from the people who read "Fake News"?
and why collect data about the people reading "Fake News"?

"Fake News" is usually targeting an audience with an established belief system. The fake news reinforces this belief, with reinforcement, comes action.

Data collected about our activities online might be objective and blind to our established belief systems. A little bit of analysis will show established activities that we do online. What we do paints what we believe, so once we have that picture somebody can reinforce it or have us question our own belief. Now, this makes the business of collecting user online data lucrative.

Once we have a picture of a persons belief system we need to re-align those beliefs that are based on facts and evidence. but how?

I guess going down this path lead me to more questions. Exploring "Fake News" lead me to believe that it is everyone's moral imperative to check evidence before we believe because our beliefs are the basis of our action. Emotion plays an important role to influence people to act not facts and data. Even if we have enough evidence to discredit a fake news story it should be presented to counter the emotional effect of the "Fake News" in order to neutralize action based on the "Fake News".
Now go check the facts on what you just read.

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