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Comment by ChemSpider | Hacker News Reader

She is correct with that statement. A decade ago I would have not imagined that "fake news" will become such a big issue for society.

We need to find ways to combat at the very least the state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. FB and others must be forced to do much more here.

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  "We need to find ways to combat at the very least the state-sponsored disinformation campaigns"

Require each account to have unique ID verification in order to confirm that it's a real person. Government can provide this service if there's concerns about user data. Allow users to post under a fake name in order to protect open speech, the only requirement is that it's a real person. This removes the bots. Foreign govts can still co-opt real people's IDs but it would be much harder for them.

I remember my faculty colleague tackling fake news in the political context using machine learning back in 2008 and he was worried that this could be the next iteration of "digital wars" that could distrupt economies.

We all shrugged it off because we didn't believed that people could be so easily manipulated as to "believe everything they saw on the Internet".

Yeah...

> need to find ways to combat at the very least the state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. FB and others must be forced to do much more here.

Here is the root of the problem... the state is the only entity that can force them. Facebook doesn't have an internal value system that will allow them to do the right thing. They could be so much better.

If we could, it would be more sustainable to not chase bad guys or implement more "fact control systems", but make people and networks more resilient against misinformation.

I would speculate in terms of better education to make people more resistant, and controls mechanisms that limit viral spread (no matter what the content is - i.e without fact review boards).

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