On behalf of Social Media Matters, I had the opportunity to moderate a panel focusing on 'Practice Experience and Learnings with Stakeholder Groups'. We had senior journalists, individuals representing fact-checking organizations, and administrators. Some amazing practitioners who have tackled and beaten the spread of misinformation.
Some of the aspects discussed were the range of reasons behind the creation and spread of misinformation. It varies from boredom, pranking to some heavily financed political propaganda, industry battles. Put together the misinformation landscape is complex. So the solution won’t be a silver bullet. What we would need to do is work together, which is an extremely simple solution, though difficult to execute.
Concepts like critical thinking, deductive reasoning need to start from home and school in order to build a culture immune to misinformation. At the moment we are at a nascent stage of still trying to figure out the routes to solving this issue. There is a lot of work required in the field of legal mechanisms, capacity building, awareness generation. This will require a community effort.
Well, we did come up with half a solution (at least in theory). Now comes the difficult part, practical execution.