DU Community Help

It would be a significant amount of work to create a new MIRT-type group with different powers to perform this role. If we were going to have new alerts for potentially fake information, I would prefer to either handle them myself or send them to Hosts. Potentially, we could alert all the Hosts of any forum on DU if a post in their forum was alerted for potentially fake information. They could then manually apply a label to the post if they agree. But again, this could only work if we were able to come up with a way to effectively send notifications which really are likely misinformation, without creating a flood of misfires and false positives.

With regard to that point, another problem here is that defining "fake information" might be more difficult than you expect. For example, what about jokes and parody? Does the Onion count? And if jokes are permitted (which I think they should be), where do you draw the line between what is considered a joke and what is considered deliberate misinformation? It can be easy to discuss this stuff in principle, but it gets a lot more difficult when you get down to writing actual rules and providing people with information about what they're supposed to be doing.

The more I think about this, the more I think that there might be a more straightforward solution than building out a bunch of new features to solve the problem. Fake information is becoming more of a problem on DU in the age of AI, but it's certainly not an overwhelming problem yet. So perhaps the solution is to have something more like the copyright alert. Copyright alerts go directly to me, and when I receive one I check out the post and if it is in violation of the copyright guidelines I can hit a link which sends an automatic copyright notification to the poster to let them know about it. After that, it's up to them to deal with it. We could perhaps set up something similar for potentially fake information, possibly in combination with some kind of labeling system that labels a post if I send a notification to the person who posted it.

I am concerned though that putting responsibility for dealing with this in the hands of one person (or a handful of people) is not the right way to deal with this. The reason I currently am happy with people repudiating fake information in replies is because it's fast, and it works. The more replies there are saying "this is fake," the better. Then readers who might have been fooled by the OP can take a second look and understand for themselves why what they're looking at might not be real. I think it better educates people to spot fake content in the long run.