In that time, public opinion shifted. People began to feel that tech companies were not just neutral hosts; they bore some responsibility for what their algorithms circulated.
I think this is a really interesting fact. Never in history have we ever had access to this much information and people who are members of certain social network sites felt they were being fed particular information that app creators were controlling.
Can we devise solutions that aren’t reactive and ad hoc, and aren’t bogged down by accusations of partisan bias? One idea is to treat fake news as a distribution problem, treating it more like spam. Spam is something the platforms already understand and deal with.
I think this is an extremely interesting aspect of this article. Another way of understanding fake news is to realize that it is a form of spam. Spam emails, calls and texts are almost always labeled spam and wind up in our spam inboxes/folders. If social media companies created better filter systems for weeding out fake news and identifying them as spam like, the circulation of these fake stories may decrease.