Caitlin Moran: my plan to tackle fake news
‘I don’t want to overstate my visionary status, but I have the answer to most of our problems’
I DON’T want to overstate my status as a 21st-century visionary, groundbreaker and mage, but I think I’ve come up with a way to solve roughly 80 per cent of humanity’s most recent problems.
Here’s a brief recap of the pickle humanity’s got itself into re technology and communication. The advent of the internet means that information – previously a relatively precious, relatively reliable and relatively difficult to accumulate resource – has suddenly become unverified and overwhelming. We live in an era where fake news is swamping us – much of it, as we are finding out, from political enemies who want to reduce western populaces to a state of confusion, rage or numb apathy.
And the churn is zombifying us. There’s no filtration system – everything is so murky and whirling that even the most engaged political nerds I know are running out of George Orwell quotes, turning off the internet and hunkering down for Bake Off.
That’s the emotional fallout.
The financial fallout is that “traditional” news and information sources – which still generally adhere to the principle that the stuff they publish is truthful, and able to stand legal scrutiny – are having their readerships, and profits, drained at a great rate of knots by these “news” rivals.
Local papers close at precipitous rates. Local councils and businesses are not held to account, events outside the major cities get pushed down the news agenda, and so the country feels ever more divided between “metropolitan elites” and the “left-behinds”. As a paid job, collecting facts, news and information is becoming precarious – ironic in a year when the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, tweeted that the only way to stop the “sensationalisation of issues and spreading unsubstantiated rumours” on Twitter was for “journalists [to] document, validate, and refute such information directly, so people can form their own opinions”. One industry – “traditional” media – is supposed to act as the check/support system for the very rival that is killing it.
And the social and philosophical fallout – oh, these are, perhaps, the biggest. Increasingly, the loudest, most furious and most extreme voices dominate the bandwidth. Quiet reason and truth do not fare well in the flood. But what to do with all those deluging the space with “alternate facts”? If you want to watch a calm, truth-revering liberal tie themselves in knots, ask them how they can square wanting to ban unreliable, bigoted voices such as President Trump from social media platforms while still being on the side of free speech and Voltaire.
But here’s the fix: we simply have, on all social media, two fonts. Two fonts, in two different colours. That’s it. That’s the solution. For verified news outlets and information services – the BBC, CNN, NASA, T he Times, the Department of Justice – we have, say, Georgia, in black.
A smart, authoritative font that tells you everything you’re reading is verified, peer-reviewed, put through a legal department, and will stand up to scrutiny. If it’s tweeted or Facebooked in this font, you know it is – as much as anything can ever be assured to be – a fact. It’s from an official source. It is recognised as trustworthy.
And for everyone, and everything, else, Comic Sans. In pink. Comic Sans says you are reading something that has simply been typed by someone who believes something, or feels something – but it’s not been researched, checked or legalled. It is, simply, a cheap, easy, any-asshole-can-have-one opinion, not a fact.
Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, then – from a man The Washington Post found to have told more than 4000 lies in just 18 months – would be pink Comic Sans. So would Sandy Hook denier Alex Jones’s, and Holocaust denier David Duke’s. And yours; and mine.
If public figures, with millions of followers, wish to gain a more dignified and respected font the burden is on them to prove to the platform they are using that they are, with a margin of error of, say, 5 per cent per year, reliable, factual and correct in their statements.
There can be no representation without responsibility
The social contract is that those who assume power must prove their privilege does not undercut those who spend millions verifying the truth, does not swamp public discourse with vengeful diatribes, secret agendas or mad fantasies, and does not contribute to the rise in humanity’s confusion, exhaustion and paranoia. The story of mankind’s progress is inextricably linked to finding out the truth, defending it and sharing it as widely as possible. Ironically, the internet gives us the greatest opportunity yet to do this. But only if we avoid a very simple category error. Only if we separate free opinion from skin-in-the-game fact, by using a risible font.
© TNL/News syndication