A Call For Quality Information
The Internet is a vast landscape of information—information we all depend on in order to access opportunity, education, products we need, to connect, and to be informed. Yet, the Internet as we know it is a rocky field pockmarked with dangerous rabbit holes—so many that it takes continued vigilance to avoid falling into one. How did this super-empowering world of information come to fuel a mob’s insurrection against the most lauded democracy in the world and inspire lawmakers to advocate the unconstitutional overturning of an overwhelming popular vote? More importantly, what can be done about it?
To answer the first question, it’s clearly about the money. Google and other social media websites like YouTube and Facebook use proprietary algorithms to drive traffic. These companies’ algorithms, seeking to maximize click through and sharing, offer you more of what you find interesting. Searching on “Republican” might get you an article at Fox News. Clicking on that might lead you to a video about Ron Paul. Following that video you may be offered another featuring Hilary Clinton’s Bengazi testimony. You begin to encounter highly click-worthy misinformation. And on it goes, down the rabbit hole. This maximizes profit for the social media company that has captured your attention. The next time you search, your preferences are remembered, and you get more of the same. Lies pay. Soon, people like you and me are led into ideologies based on lies, harming the fabric of society.
It wasn’t always this way. From 1949 until 1987 the Fairness Doctrine was FCC policy in the United States.
The Fairness Doctrine required news organizations to:
Provide adequate coverage of public issues, and
To ensure that coverage fairly represented opposing views.
Can you imagine what Cable News would be like if it adequately covered public issues? If YouTube and Facebook search results fairly represented opposing views?
I believe access to quality information is a human right. I believe we need a law— a new Fairness Doctrine for the Digital Age. This law is not censorship. It will recognize quality information as a right, and prioritize it over profit, eliminating the rabbit holes that radicalize our brothers and sisters. It will give us all a common set of facts from which to determine our beliefs.
This Fairness Doctrine for the Digital Age must include three things:
News organizations must cover and social media algorithms must deliver significant news of public interest.
News organizations and social media companies must fairly present multiple sides of the issue in broadcasts and search requests; search results and broadcasts must support the points of view with quality research and other facts as much as possible. They must label popularly held points of view that are verifiable lies.
Those news organizations espousing lies, or evidencing bias towards ideologies that are unconstitutional, such as discrimination and violence towards minorities, and social media companies who use algorithms that consistently favor lies or the viewpoint of one ideology that is unconstitutional for more than four months will lose their license to broadcast via FCC communications channels, cable, and online.
We can’t turn the clock back, but we can move forward by protecting our right to quality information with a new Fairness Doctrine. We have seen the cost of unbridled for-profit information. Now let’s see what life can be like with access to quality information for all.
Here is an ACM article on algorithms to get us started:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/networks/finally-a-means-for-bursting-social-media-bubbles