This isn’t nearly as complicated as some may make it out to be, probably because they don’t want to be bothered, or because they’re not familiar with how to manage risk and security (I’m a cybersecurity architect), or the most likely explanation, which is certain people make a lot money and thrive on confusion, especially when the government (oh excuse me, the people) pay for it. It’s a real problem when very few politicians understand cyber security.

The biggest problem is that the people that need to be warned about fake news are precisely the people that will do everything they can to avoid anything that’s verified. They will listen to it from any source no matter how unreliable or how small of an operation it is.

For example, look at the workflow associated with social media:
Are people going to tend to want to prioritize news from reliable sources like news channel such as ABC, MSNBC, etc and even Fox? (reliable from their perspective) The platforms can certainly arrange to have verification of digital signatures applied for example, as soon as the videos or articles are uploaded into their feed. If you want to read something from MSNBC, make sure you read it from their channel. If it’s not coming from their channel, you should trust it less and there should be a big marker on the social media feed indicating this. Of course that requires our politicians to push really hard on the social media platforms and audit them. I don’t think our politicians have the wherewithal to do this.

There are no perfect solutions, but we could certainly plug some of the big holes, if our leaders had a reasonable plan and didn’t geek out and fall in love with the technology, or focus on making themselves look good, like politicians always do!

If we don’t have people who understand how to manage this issue and track progress and make changes as needed we’re all screwed. And the autocracy powers will prevail.