By Gus Hurwitz –
The contemporary problem of fake news is urgent but difficult to address. Fake news propagates across social media platforms, competing with better sources of information (“real news”) for consumer attention. As social media platforms have grown over the past decades from myriad small discussion forums to dominant platforms traditional news media have experienced catastrophic declines in revenue and readership. It is easy to conflate these two trends, linking the monopoly-like growth of social media platforms and their control over consumer attention with the decline in the traditional media’s ability to command such attention. But such conflation is inapposite to rise of fake news and decline of real news. Fake news is not an antitrust problem – it is something far more serious and difficult.
