FAKE NEWS WITH INTEGRITY

James Meadows • January 17, 2017

I was delighted to witness one of the most profound moments in the social media world. It is the recent announcement by Bacelook that it will now label fake news. Recognizing that too many uninformed readers can be misled by fake news, Bacelook made the brave choice to save you and me a lot of difficulty by simply doing the homework for us. I for one am thrilled. If your life is anything like mine then you will agree that you have way too much to do without having to worry about actually thinking for yourself.

If that wasn’t good enough all by itself (can it get any better? Yes, it does!), Bacelook remains committed to taking the high road on integrity by using its new Fake News Rating System. This originated from a strategy meeting last week with Bacelook’s executive leadership team.

Just as people of questionable motives will contaminate real news feeds with fake news, the reverse is also true. People of questionable motives will contaminate fake news with real news. This is where matters can really become extremely complicated, but not beyond Bacelook’s ability to navigate that complexity. Here is how Bacelook plans to handle the flip side of fake news using its Fake News Rating System:

Any identified fake news will remain flagged as fake news. However, for anything that has polluted the fake news data stream that is actually real news, that item will be flagged as “fake news level 2.”

Should any of that fake news level 2 evolve into real news and thus feed back into the real news data stream, but then at some point become corrupted again, it will then be labeled as “fake news level 3.” The cycle of assigning levels will progress as far as necessary to remain accurate.

Obviously, the big advantage to readers like you and me is that we don’t have to worry about backtracking all the news-feed loops to figure out exactly what stage of the news cycle we might be reading at any given moment. And by the way, always remember one key truth:

Fake fake news equals real news.

But you won’t have to try to figure that out. Bacelook will do it for you!

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