Fake news has become one of the most important problems of our time, and Microsoft is one of the technology companies that has been showing the greatest concern about this issue. It is totally understandable, after all, fake news has already shown the damage they can do both economically and socially and politically.
In this sense, I think it is important to highlight that there are other profound problems that ultimately end up greatly influencing the success of fake news. One of them is the educational one, that is to say, the lack of knowledge of many people to be able to reason if something can be false or not, which would be the Cognitive abilityand another is in the volitional capacity, which we can define as the desire to act based on a specific motivation, and which implies that many people are prone to believe fake news that fit with their interests, beliefs or motivations. It fits with the classic “how can it be fake if it says exactly what I think” meme.
If you wonder why fake news is used so much, the reason is very simple, because allow to influence and manipulate large masses, and because they have an enormous reach through social networks. The passivity of these is also another of the great culprits that have reached an almost “pandemic” level, and that is that we have reached a point where we confuse freedom of expression and censorship with a very important key, the veracity of the information. .
Microsoft has made a profound assessment of this issue, and has come to the conclusion that labeling fake news as false news, which is precisely what it is no matter how many times we try to give it, can be interpreted as a form of censorship. Therefore, instead of hunting down and labeling as such content that fits as fake news, it could choose to expose clients and agencies that are dedicated to the creation and distribution of propaganda.
This poses another problem, and that is that it further complicates the identification of fake news, since it requires the user to have a greater cognitive capacity to associate that a piece of news is false by its author. I find it absurd that we are being afraid to call things by their real name, and it horrifies me to think that with this we are giving strength and making things easier to lie and misinformation. Microsoft doesn’t seem to have thought this through.
Marking news as fake when it really is it is not censorship or restricts in any way the right to freedom of expression. Lying with the intention of manipulating a person or a mass of people can never fit in with the idea of freedom of expression, and that is precisely what happens with fake news. We must also be clear that a fake news is not an opinion that may have more or less truth in it, it is news, an article that aims to inform, or rather misinform, to generate that manipulation and influence to achieve a certain objective, or to prevent others from achieving theirs. It is a very serious issue, and we cannot take it lightly.
