Finding Truth in the age of "fake news"

Finding truth, or a suitable tracer, is crucial for making informed decisions. We are not facing a novel crisis of truth, truth has always be battled by people trying to influence others to gain power and control. Only the methods are changing with the technology.

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The underlying problem is that there is no final instance to define truth. We have to discover it for ourselves.

In some cases this is no problem. For example if I claim that a stone will fall down. You can trust me, or you can verify it for yourself because the cost of doing so is minimal. The same idea is used in bitcoin, where every single participant can individually verify transaction and does not require a permission or secret information to do so.

Just as bitcoin, finding truth is a decentralised process. Anyone may come up with a hypothesis and everyone can verify that hypothesis individually. Under these idealised conditions, discovering truth is called science, the only unbiased method to gain information that we have.

In particular we do not even need to make the verification ourselves. It is enough to know that verification is possible individually, at a reasonable cost and without permission. Under these conditions it is almost impossible for faulty statements to survive over extended amounts of time. If multiple people independently tell you that a stone will fall down, it is very unlikely nobody has checked.

The big problem is that not all questions can be answered with this optimal method. In some cases the costs of verification are prohibitive (for example LHC particle physics) or there is secret information (all government actions). Or the measurements may be contaminated. In these cases the individual discovery of truth is no longer possible and trust is required.

Trust is always a weakness, but we have to base our actions on something. If it cannot be avoided, we need to ask how trusted networks can be implemented without a too large big risk of abuse. Clearly we should avoid centralised structures if possible. A central and trusted authority is the easiest to corrupt and given the power of truth it should be safe to assume that all central instances that decide the "official narrative" are at east somewhat biased.

Instead, when trust is unavoidable, we need to look to decentralised solutions that are inherently difficult to corrupt. And in fact humans have done exactly that for a long time:

• establishing a network of trust (similar to the ripple payment protocol). This is what people have always used for their peronal contacts. From your peers you choose whom to trust. Then if multiple trusted parties come up with the same answer you take that as an honest approximation of truth. If they come up with conflicting information you reevaluate whom to trust.

• using the wisdom of the crowds. Create a public space for information. Then take the information that has the largest support as an approximation for truth. Obviously this may be wrong in many cases, but when you manage to incentivise the right people to speak it may turn out okay most of the time. The best known platform loosely based on this idea is wikipedia.

• trust only yourself. Try to come up with a working theory explaining your first-hand knowledge and take that as "truth". This method cannot be corrupted at all. But it is limited since you cannot benefit from the huge amount of knowledge amassed by the human species.

• consume as many different biased sources as possible. If you read the same in a left and right blog, probably there is some truth to it. If many eyewitnesses report the same, likely that is true. This method is dangerous because it relies a lot on the intellect of the consumer. Often people will think that there are conflicting stories, just because the do not really understand the topic. It also requires the consumer to have an outside look onto the consumed media and understand their bias correctly. But when applied properly this method does have a good potential.

Probably there are more options, I am interested to discuss other decentralised ideas in the comments. But in any case these methods do not find absolute truth, the only give you an answer that is more or less aligned with truth. So when acting always consider this fact. But we cannot gain access to absolute truth, then this is the best we have.

Sadly, in the past and present many people rely on centralised authorities to find truth. In the past this was necessary since already the reporting of news was centralised. In order to publish news you needed to own a printing press and that was far too expensive for ordinary people. This problem was well known and in order to balance it out the principle of "freedom of press" was established. If there are only few entities printing news, these should be as independent as possible. In practice, this was never the case and print media have always portrayed a biased version of the world. Sometimes it worked quite okay, sometimes it was really just propaganda. Nowadays this barrier is gone and everyone can publish at almost no cost. Freedom of press is really just freedom of speech today.

But not everything is great in the age of the internet. Without realising people are consuming very centralised information.
The probably biggest topic is social media. We might think that these are close to the above mentioned networks of trust, but this is far from the truth. Facebook does not write the news, but it decides what you see from all the available stories. This is in fact allows them to push any narrative they want and consumers see it as a first hand information coming from their friends, or at least endorsed by their friends (via a like).

The possibilities to manipulate the come with this power are huge. Facebook is a private company and has every right to exploit it. As long as they just give you some ads little harm is done. But when some elites use facebook to create a certain narrative that becomes very dangerous.

Governments and other parties have long recognised the power of social media. What may be happening is largely hidden in the dark, but we know that there are efforts to banish certain views from facebook. Some stories will be labeled as "fake news" and while they are not removed directly, they will be blocked from propagating the network. On the other hand some stories may be favoured.

These networks then no longer serve as a good tracer to find truth. And we need to realise this. If we want to battle fake news, we do not need centralised banning, we need decentralised solutions where every person is in individually in control. Fake news are defeated by good and honest news, people speaking out against them, by having the freedom to access as much information as possible. If we rely on quick and simple centralised and authoritarian solutions, we are just creating the system on which the next generation of fake news will thrive.

Steem may be the first step in the right direction. If you ignore trending to instead build and update your own list of people to follow, then this resembles a network of trust. There are a lot of flaws here, but there is also a lot of potential.

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