*02/25/2017
On the fake news epidemic:
Forget about how fake news may have lead to the election of Donald J. Trump in the U.S. or the British voting in favour of succeeding from the E.U.—disinformation isn't the main issue or even a new phenomenon. The Web, being much more accessible to both publishers and consumers than the mediums that preceded it, merely increased its propagation.
The problem is our absolute certainty that our worldview is the truest one.
Through the Web, and especially social media, each of us has created our own bubbles by surrounding ourselves entirely with information that confirms our biases.
It used to be that we got our information from newspapers, radio and TV broadcasts. Professional editors and producers carefully curated information based on the public's interest—what they deemed provided citizens with the knowledge to be free and self-governing. We, as consumers, still had the freedom to engage with or disregard any source or story we wanted, but we had a finite amount of selected content to rummage through, and as long as it came from reputable publishers or broadcasters, we had little reason to question its authenticity. This is not to say the media was utterly impartial—it wasn't—but no one media then perfectly matched any one person's worldview.
This information we received from newspapers, radio and TV broadcasts, along with multiple other agents, formed our worldview. If we believed Policy X would lead to Outcome Y but increasingly saw reports that it lead to Outcome Z, we, generally, changed our worldview accordingly.
Now the tide's turned: Our worldview has come to determine the information we consume. The actual outcome of Policy X no longer matters. Our initial belief is what matters. We look for the headline that says "You were right about Policy X"—and with the abundance of sources available on the Web, the headline exists somewhere—so we can pat ourselves on the back. Regardless of the truth, we follow, read and share those sources all the while remaining oblivious to the other viewpoints out there.
The more we filter information according to our worldview, the more the bubble compresses, the more subjective we become to disinformation and the more unawarely uninformed we become.
The solution is to burst the bubble—to let the information determine our worldview rather than have our worldview determine the information we consume.