I've been thinking about the state of our media, and the crisis of trust in news began long before AI.
We have a huge issue, and the problem is with the producers and the platform.
I'm not talking about professional journalists who make an honest mistake, own up to it with a retraction, and apologize. I’m talking about something far more damaging: the rise of false journalists, who are partisan political activists whose primary goal is to push a deliberately misleading or false narrative.
We often hear the classic remedy for bad speech: more speech, not censorship. The idea is that good arguments will naturally defeat bad ones in the marketplace of ideas.
Here's the trap: these provocateurs create content that is so outrageously or demonstrably false that it generates massive engagement. People are trying to fix their bad speech with more speech. And the algorithm mistakes this chaotic engagement for value.
As a result, the algorithm pushes the train wreck to the forefront. The genuinely good journalists get drowned out. They are ignored by the algorithm because measured, factual reporting simply doesn't generate the same volatile reaction.
The false journalists, meanwhile, see their soaring popularity and assume it's because their "point" is correct and it's those 'evil nazis from the far right who are wrong'. In reality, they're not popular because they're insightful; they're popular because they're a train wreck. We're all rubbernecking at the disaster and the system is rewarding them for crashing the integrity of our information.