Speech Police by David Kaye

It is a very short book but brought out a lot of interesting stories about the struggle to govern the internet on Fake News. I guess when it comes to handling fake news, we cannot solely rely on the platforms because it is a compliance costs to them which they will try their best to avoid. We cannot solely rely on politicians because the nature of platforms now allows people of influence to carry out their influence far and wide because of the concentration of people on these platforms are huge and if we are to rely on the general population, critical thinking and education is needed. We can only rely on ourselves because, at least if I am a politician, a not-so-clever population will work to my advantage/influence.

The author did propose some solutions which I believe platforms can take to bring everyone onboard and that is transparency. Publish how many times government agencies have requested for data, pull down of posts or any posts that is contested request from the  contesting party to present the other side of the story, put them side  by side for the traffic to "arbiter" the truth for themselves. One example is Netflix which posted which shows was requested by government agencies to be banned. Here is the article.

Fake news is not going to be an easy challenge to tackle going forward and I think each party, platform, politicians and the general population need to work together to rid off it.

Recommended read and I rate it 4 out of 5 stars.