As technology further progresses and evolves, creating and spreading fake news becomes a lot easier. Fake news is able to spread very quickly across social media platforms, and it is very hard to stop the spread of this news. Fake news will also become more and more close to real news, which could lead to nobody really knowing the truth.
The problem with fake news is the sheer impact it can have on society. A single tweet the the White House was bombed and the US president was injured was retweeted thousands of time and caused the US lose 139 billion dollars in a day. Another problem is that as technology progresses, the harder it is to discern real news from fake news. In a few years, people will be able to create fake audio and video clips that are nearly identical to real video and audio clips. If this happens, the effect would be immeasurable, and nobody will be able to tell what is true and what is not.
In order to stop the spread of fake news, governments are demanding that social media platforms be transparent in how data is collected, distributed, and used. The problem is that if that happens, the data will not be secure anymore, which is also very important to people. This is called the transparency paradox, and is why we can’t have companies being transparent. However, it is still possible to keep data secure while having companies be transparent, however hard it might be.
One way that this might happen is that the social media platforms share their data with only the government, which is pretty much the most trustworthy source there is. That way the government can stop fake news from spreading, while not giving the data to everybody, which would keep it secure while preventing fake news from spreading. The problems with this is that this would give more power to the government, which would allow it to have more control about what we know. Another problem is that there is no way to keep the government silent with our data, which means we would again just be giving the government more power.