[LINK] The World Is Choking on Digital Pollution

[David]

On Tuesday, 22 January 2019 09:02:46 AEDT Tom Worthington wrote:

> 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.

Well said...  the "news" thing is just a come-on as far as I can see.

> 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.

But some organisation still has to define the criteria.  There's a range of probability covering news which is probably genuine ("tiger bites man"), news which is doubtful ("man bites tiger"), and news which is obviously fake ("Martian spaceship discovered").

However the news in the grey-area is sometimes the most important, and I can't see how it would be possible to assess its reliability without checking the sources.  But then we might as well forget about the app and create a reliable news service.

> 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.

That's why the ABC is now more important than ever.  Fairfax is probably still OK, but for how long?  IMO The Saturday Paper is probably also reliable, but it tends to have a restricted focus and I find some sections are of little interest.

And while The Conversation isn't a news service, it's _well_ worth reading.

DL.