The greatest providers of the digital ecosystem, Google, Facebook and Twitter, have begun to execute their tourniquets to contain the haemorrhage of manipulated or fake news that sneak into social media and that opened the doors to the post-truth era.
Twitter has just dictated a new regulation to prevent the airing of the same message that is then disseminated or “viralized” by thousands of different bot accounts, as an effort to avoid the malicious activities that many of them suggest.
Google is also creating tools to help maintain the quality of journalism around social media, with filters or algorithms that systematically eliminate all content considered fraudulent.
This not only has to do with news but with misleading advertisements or with the mischievous manipulation of videos and audios in which images and other people’s voices are superimposed.
Meanwhile, Facebook has presented a new educational tool to help media and users identify fake news and also break the modality of economic incentives that support said kind of news.
Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of the company, said that fake news and hoaxes are harmful to this network’s community and makes the world less informed.
For such purposes, Facebook has established a decalogue of advice through its tool “News Feed”, which include distrusting unverified or questionable titles, telling users to go research from other sources and check the origin of photos and videos.
All this set of technological efforts is aimed at preventing the digital deluge of fake news, which by today has affected the credibility of any content, gave birth to an avalanche of insults, lies, and manipulated information in a dishonest and wicked way to deceive people, institutions, products and electoral processes in the world.
At a juncture like this, if something must become relevant, it must be the commitment of professional journalism with its mission of rigorously reporting information while applying the mechanisms and filters that help to verify the reliability of the news and the ethical premises that ensure the quality and integrity of this job.
– Translated from spanish by Randy Rodriguez.
Director's Thoughts 