Escaping the ‘More is Less’ Trap

As Israel heads for one of the most important elections in its history (some would argue: the most critical), the public needs as much truthful information as possible. But that won’t be easy.

In my blog post last week, I noted that the world is currently inundated by a flood of information and misinformation. The former overwhelms us in its quantity, leaving little time or inclination to dig deeper than the headlines given FOMO. The latter, also growing in quantity, threaten the very foundations of our contemporary lives: socially, politically and even scientifically. For if we cannot make reasonable decisions – personally or collectively – based on what is real, then modernity and even democracy withers away.

For example, trust in democratic government is on the decline around the world. I would venture to say that the problem lies less in maladroit governance (all governments err) than in the inability of the governed to separate the informational wheat from the chaff. This is true regarding “over-information” – too much, too fast; it’s especially true for “untruthful information” that renders the average citizen helpless in deciding what’s real and what’s not.

Proposed solutions should attack both problems, and yet we also have to be careful not to throw out the baby (free speech) with the dirty bathwater (misinformation). How, then, to separate the two?

My answer – of course, not the only possible solution – is to copy and update a system that humanity has developed in many other fields of life. Remember the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for product quality? And today’s Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s, and Fitch rating agencies for corporate and government bonds? Consumer Reports for product testing? The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for air transportation safety? All these (and many others like them e.g., pharmaceutical testing laboratories that ensure drug safety, efficacy, and regulatory compliance) are mostly nonprofit organizations or independent government agencies dedicated to unbiased regulation and/or reviews of the fields in which they specialize. To put it colloquially, these are “kosher certifications” i.e., the “products” under review have passed tests of quality control, safety, and other positive qualities.

News information is also a “product” whose truthfulness can be verified. Here, however, a different methodology has to be employed given the huge amount of minute-by-minute news and other types of not-so-immediate information flooding the world (e.g., scientific breakthroughs that didn’t happen “yesterday”; long-term trends – what I elsewhere called “General News”: https://www.profslw.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/General-News.Journalism-article.1.2010-1.pdf). To that end, we could employ two different means that already exist: Google’s PageRank coupled with AI.

How does Google decide what’s more worthy and trustworthy to appear as an answer in a person’s query? It uses an algorithm (“PageRank”) that evaluates the importance of a web page by counting the quantity and quality of website links pointing to that page, all of them acting as a sort of “vote of confidence.” Thus, a link from a highly authoritative site (e.g., major news outlet) carries a lot more weight than a link from an obscure blog or a spam factory.

To this one can add an AI algorithm that checks the trustworthiness of the original source(s) for each news item or even specific individual fact within the news report. It would then keep track “forever” of the quality of the news vendor (newspaper, blogger, PR practitioner, etc.) by giving a “veracity rating” to each item and its sources. The more truthful its news, the higher the rating – and vice versa. As a result, not only would news consumers be able to immediately see a news purveyor’s general ranking but also the specific item’s “score.”

Such a system would be voluntary for each news purveyor, unless legislation mandated general use. But even if voluntary, the pressure on each news producer would be immense to have such a “Seal of Approval,” as the public would stay away from those that don’t have it. No one today buys a bond that hasn’t been rated; no Orthodox Jew purchases meat without a kosher certification. Similarly, few in the future would want to spend time on a news medium that refuses to have its information vetted by an independent organization for truth or falsity.

To be sure, such certification/ranking/grading would not extend to commentary, analysis etc. – except where and when the commentator bases the analysis on “facts” that can be immediately checked by AI and posted right next to the “fact” (or as a “footnote” in the overall piece). As to whether the AI algorithm itself can be trusted, the approval agency itself would have to ensure that it’s using a trustworthy AI. Indeed, that’s the main reason the financial ranking field has three such independent agencies, as noted above. The AI-check algorithm would also come under scrutiny for veracity and ranking consistency, guaranteeing that they would do their best to ensure the AI system was fair. (Indeed, because of fears that AIs might become too powerful, we are witness these days to serious European and American efforts by the leading AI companies themselves to have their governments establish some sort of overall AI regulatory agency to ensure AI safety ; add that to the list above.)

In short, such a dual system (ranking and AI vetting) could appreciably reduce “fake news”: misinformation, disinformation, fabrications etc. But what about the overall too-much-news-quantity problem? First, by getting rid of most fake news, the overall quantity of news automatically drops. Second, by undermining the unreliable news purveyors, many of them will eventually go out of business – further lowering the amount of news out there. Third, even partly reliable news purveyors with a middling score ranking might well leave the scene as the public gravitates to the highest ranked news sites.

Is this a total solution? Certainly not. A not inconsiderable percentage of the public actively seek out “fake news” for its entertainment value and/or its giving the middle finger to the mainstream public and their political representatives. For some of these, a very low news veracity ranking would actually be a come-on! Human nature being what it is, and free speech constituting the sine qua non of democracy, there will always be the “anti’s” among us.

But for the public in general and information-based democracy specifically, the time has come to find solutions to the problem. After all, freedom of speech is meaningless without freedom from (bad) speech. Or to turn the above title on its head: “Less is More”!