What's with this new trend of "how do we know what's fake or real?!" - am I going crazy or was this stuff was taught in high school? This is why we wrote papers, to learn critical communication skills (as writer and reader).

We determine what is fake in the same we we always did. Sanity checking the authors, validating for self-consistency, cross-checking evidence, searching for conflicting interests, and evaluating probable accuracy based on those factors.

The paradigm shift is the Internet as a whole: democratizing dissemination of information. Facebook, email, same thing.

We're now flooded with noise from random anonymous un-credentialed entities, unable to track and filter out low-signal sources. The public is the new broadcast medium... the narrative becomes whatever resonates strongest with some subpopulation, rapidly spread through the wires by people who never critically analyze agreement.

Old news institutions at least held some degree of credibility... plenty of faults, from simple mistakes to missed coverage to occasional outright propaganda (generally corporate) - but there was accountability. John Doe wrote for The City Times, you learned to ignore the bad reporters and institutions, and if we go back far enough you could actually talk to them in-person.

Every democratization comes with a social challenge of creating norms to maintain order. Political democracy is a work in progress, economic democracy currently not viable, I guess this signals it's time for us to face information democracy...

It used to be urban legends, and I'm not talking like Bloody Mary stuff. I'm talking about relatives at the dinner table saying "Did you hear they did carbon dating on a chicken bone and it said it was millions of years old. Guess that disproves evolution!" and when pressed for a source, well, they heard it from someone. But now with Facebook we're exposed to so much more of it, and so much of it is crafted to mislead.

We all went through those lessons in high school, but for a lot of people they just didn't sink in. And they still don't. Talk to a high school teacher about how their students use Wikipedia.

And the problem is that Facebook has dozens of scores about our personality which allow them to individually steer and control people. What you share is not what all your "friends" see. They see what Facebook decides to show. Plus what else Facebook decides is helping to keep your friends happy with the platform. Facebook is not like Wikipedia, a platform for all to freely and transparently share, no it's only purpose is to bind us to the platform and get willing ad targets.

The problem isn't that it's a mechanism for sharing. It's that all previous mechanisms for sharing did not have central control mechanisms that discriminated based on content.

The postal service cannot prioritize letters that encourage banning abortion. Telephone companies cannot subsidize conversations about organizing unions. Facebook, on the other hand, can exert control over how visible a post is based on whether or not it, say, supports Donald Trump.

> It's that all previous mechanisms for sharing did not have central control mechanisms that discriminated based on content.

Many previous mechanisms for sharing do have such central control mechanisms, and exercise them far more enthusiastically than does FB. Dead tree print outlets are a mechanism for sharing with such features. Meatspace social clubs are a sharing mechanism with such features.

Facebook may be unique in the degree of it's reach for a sharing mechanism with the capacity for centralized editorial control, but it is not historically unique in being a sharing mechanism which features the capacity for centralized editorial control.

Yeah, and another complicating factor is that Facebook's control over your news feed feels invisible. How much pro-Trump content you see in your news feed feels like it's entirely the fault of how pro-Trump your friends are. How much pro-Trump content you see in your newspaper feels like it's the fault of the paper's editorial board, regardless of whether it's a letter to the editor or an official piece.

The real problem is that Facebook is controlled by a single person, who is planning to use it for their own political goals.

Ehh, acting like these companies need to actively filter isn't a great scenario either. I think we need more visibility into what our neighbors are discussing so we can't echo chamber quite as easily.

If we go back to some philosophical roots, Facebook as a company and those who control it (may) effectively have a monopoly on the "marketplace of ideas". This doesn't mean they are abusing that power, nor that the monopoly is complete. But it is an influential force in that old 'marketplace' - a notion that gave birth to the first amendment. The marketplace of ideas is a critical component of our democracy.

This hints at mechanisms to deal with such a monopoly (were it to arise) in analogy to how the government has protected its people by dealing with economic monopolies (sometimes creating them deliberately, sometimes monitoring them, and sometimes breaking them up when they abuse that position, etc.).

Changes in quantity can be changes in quality. That is, yes, facebook is the same as forwarding emails, but it's orders of magnitude easier to share and view content.

That's true but social networks are more ubiquitous than emails and print media. Also, in an email chain the person has prior knowledge that the news is fake. The same is not true of social media feeds.

I'd say the bigger problem is the way Facebook props up and emphasizes popular shares.

Imagine if those chain emails from your crazy uncle were always displayed prominently at the top of your inbox depending on the number of forwards.

The complaint appears to be that it is difficult to engage in traditional "assertion-rebuttal" debate via facebook advertising. My understanding is that all campaigns are free to target any demographic, so a "best foot forward" competition is still possible. It seems to me that the shift in debate model is more a threat to a particular political marketing specialty than to democracy as a whole.

A possible counter argument is unlike television advertising buys, the targeting is incredibly specific. The chances of you being able to match your opponents targeting are much smaller, which leaves slices of populations hearing only one side.

And like the article points out, the inefficiencies (from the campaign's point of view) of the current targeting may be doing an overall service to democracy by giving populations a message they wouldn't otherwise hear.

There is a lot of hand waving in this argument but I'm convinced we should attempt to solidify what effects are there and whether we find them valuable before dismissing it.

It's possible that advertising buys won't overlap completely, but as the targeting gets more specific, the targeted slice gets smaller and smaller ... to the point where it is questionable that the slice can have an electoral impact even if the lack of explicit rebuttal has a significant impact on the opinions of the targeted slice. Assertion-rebuttal is an effective rhetorical technique, but it is certainly not the only technique. Honestly, familiarity with the candidate's name seems to dominate everything else. Perhaps I'm underestimating the impact of unchallenged claims, but even in that case both sides are still on a level playing field.

My experience with fake news on social media so far was that somebody always stepped up to point out it is fake.

No such mechanism in traditional media. In my country sometimes news outlets can be forced (by law) to publish a correction of a false story, but it is usually done in small print and gets hushed over.