[LINK] The World Is Choking on Digital Pollution

[Tom Worthington]

On 21/1/19 1:31 pm, Kim Holburn wrote:

>> ... Society figured out how to manage the waste produced by the
>> Industrial Revolution. We must do the same thing with the Internet
>> today. ...

Facebook is working as designed. It was not intended to provide a news 
service to the public, but to sell them stuff. It does this by showing 
you things you will like, based on past preferences and what your 
friends like.

If you want a quality news service, that could be created. But who is 
going to pay for it? Keep in mind that whoever pays, gets to decide what 
is news, and what is not.

For decades news was funded by advertising. But then Google and Facebook 
found they could sell the ads without the news. If we not willing to pay 
for a quality news service, how can it be provided?

What we could perhaps have is are some third party apps like a spam
filter applied to web content. This would mark what it though was fake news.


-- 
Tom Worthington, MEd FHEA FACS CP http://www.tomw.net.au +61(0)419496150
TomW Communications Pty Ltd. PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia
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Honorary Lecturer, Computer Science, Australian National University
https://cecs.anu.edu.au/research/profile/tom-worthington