[rchaud]

After attending a recent hackathon focused on this topic, I came away thinking most of the solutions were emphasizing some kind of automated fact checking solution.

I don't know if that alone will fix it. Fake news exists because people want to believe it, and are willing to lower their bullshit meters in order to use the article as "ammunition" in a political argument with their friends/family/Twitter egg. People aren't looking for "antivirus" tools to stop fake news; they're actively looking to share links that confirm their view of the world. It doesn't even matter if the link has a "wordpress.org" or "blogspot.com" domain. We live in a time when people don't even read the articles, they just look at the headline and jump into the comments to fight someone.

To fight fake news effectively, perhaps we need to do a better job of uncovering why people apparently have so much time to spend on the Internet to argue with people they'll never meet. Perhaps while we're at it, we could also look into why we have a political system where legalized bribery ('lobbying') gives preferential access to the powerful. We're at the point where winning elections is based less on getting enough people to agree with your vision, and more on playing one group of disaffected voters off against another.

I wish you luck, but I believe this is a people problem, not a tech problem.