The New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones called Twitter a “self-cleaning oven,” suggesting that false information could be flagged and self-corrected almost immediately. We no longer had to wait 24 hours for a newspaper to issue a correction.
Jeff Jarvis wrote over the weekend, we need to be careful what we wish for: We don’t want Facebook to become the arbiter of truth.
Instead, I would encourage the social platforms to include prominent features for filtering and flagging. They should work with journalists and social psychologists to invent a new visual grammar so that when content is fact-checked, debunked, corrected, or verified, those processes are transparent and available to anyone seeking to understand more about the origins of a story.
To begin to develop a grammar of fake news, I collected six types of false information we’ve seen this election season.
- Authentic materials used in the wrong context
- Imposter news sites designed to look like brands we already know
- Fake news sites
- Fake information
- Manipulated content
- Parody content