‘Fake News: The Facts’ – A thought provoking debate organised by Intelligence Squared this evening brought together a large number of impressive speakers, all with diverse backgrounds and opinions. And all trying to tackle what the concept of ‘fake news’ means, how the issue of its virality could be solved and by whom.

Speakers at the event: Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and Wikitribune; Craig Silverman of Buzzfeed, Tim Wu – former adviser to Barack Obama and one of America’s most influential lawyers, the very famous Armando Iannucci, Sarah Sands from the BBC Radio 4, and journalist James Delingpole joined. You can find more details about the speakers on the Intelligence Squared website.

The idea that stayed with me at the end of the event was that education is key for a ’fake news’ –free future. And by education I mean bringing back the art of debating, to help us be able to see both sides of a story AND build our ability to interrogate what we read or see. While Facebook and Google can and should focus on finding ways to flag these fake facts to users, it’s more important to develop our brains in this direction and not get it all sorted via an algorithm that tells us what to believe. I really enjoyed Armando Iannucci’s idea of focusing on educating our minds to appreciate the idea of debate more. And although it was raised half joking, his idea of a Ponder app similar as key features (think swipe right – left) to Tinder is actually a pretty valid idea.

Below are some of the most interesting opinions and suggestions I’ve heard from each of the speakers (or at least my interpretation of what they said, in the spirit of ‘truth’):

Tim Wu: He believes that fake news is the new term for propaganda. As propaganda was closely linked to totalitarian ideologies, there is a rising concern that fake news used to manipulate the masses at the moment is actually a sign of a new type of totalitarianism that could be slowly rising. ‘Fake news is always the tool of extremists.’ – he says.

Craig Silverman: He sees the economic appeal of spreading fake news, as it’s something that can be so easily monetised. And that makes it even more dangerous, as it gives those involved in creating it an incentive to continue. He also admits to its undeniable impact on polarising people with different political views. As everyone agreed, Facebook and Google are key to the increased velocity of this type of articles. And so some potential steps to eradicate this would be – More transparency and even providing access to their data to a 3^rd party to help them tackle this issue would be a start to finding a solution.

Armando Iannucci: My favourite is his focus on brining the concept of debate as part of education. Two other important things he mentioned are that: 1 – we always need to keep in mind that facts are different from the truth, we can fact check but we cannot claim to hold the truth, as it is very subjective. 2 – If you want people to understand why you’re defending a particular issue, you have to keep reminding people of the facts that led you to that conclusion.

Sarah Sands: My favourite quote ‘You don’t have to be first, you have to be right.’

James Delingpole: Quite rightly says that fake news has always been among us, from the oldest of times, starting with pure gossip. However, he also believes the fact that ‘fake news’ is seen as a real issue today is a mere invention of media to justify their shock to not being able to correctly predict Brexit or Trump’s election. Personally – I would say that was indeed the trigger for everyone to realise the issue, but it’s not really an excuse.

Jimmy Wales: Another aspect of this is looking at the impact of current business models for most media – they monetize through advertising only. This model creates an immediate pressure on bringing more eyeballs to a website and makes quality journalism so much more difficult. More importantly he was the one who voiced the fact that we do also need to admit that there is a group of people susceptible to fake news because they are a segment who feel left out by the current political agendas and public figures.
How to solve this? – We go back to the ethical responsibility that lies with Facebook and Google. Finding a system that would respect privacy while flagging, in a gentle way, to the users, that the news they are about share has been fact checked and proven to be fake.