There should be an app for that

You almost certainly by now know my thoughts on the need to combat online misinformation, but if not they're discussed at considerable length here.

In brief : restricting certain kinds of misinformation is likely to do infinitely more good than harm. Social media should be treated as its own beast and not as a close analogy of more classical information channels  - it has similarities with various different traditional forms of media, and also important differences from all of them. So too does the misinformation being spread there.

The reason so much of it is obvious rubbish is that only a small fraction arises from genuine, hyperpartisan ideologies and weird fringe beliefs. Much more is about deliberately creating distrust and weakening our capacity for rational thinking. No-one is really trying to persuade you that cancer causes cheese or that socialists want to eat your cats - by a saturation-bombing campaign of near-gibberish, they're trying to convince you only that certain outlets can't be trusted. Anyone can stumble on the truth with enough effort, but few indeed - however stupid - will independently reach the claims propagated through fake news outlets. No-one would have otherwise independently concluded that the 5G network causes COVID-19. They're trying to get you to abandon belief in objective facts, which can't be bent or broken, so they can manipulate your emotional beliefs, which can.

For this reason, fake news, unlike truth, must be at least partially above ground to flourish. The inherent goal of fake news is to reach as many people as possible. Debunking such material, fighting speech with speech, is in this instance a mistake - at best it propagates the myth further, at worst it legitimises it. You cannot win a rational argument with someone who has a vested interested in spreading irrationality. Instead, the material needs to be removed outright.

The purposes and ideological basis of fake news outlets means that, unlike other cases, cutting off the supply of such drivel won't cause people to go underground in search of their lost comfort news - for one thing, they never actually wanted it in the first place. But far more importantly, there's no value to the outlet unless it spreads to large numbers of people. The goal is at best to appeal to base emotions, and at worst to spread distrust. It is not, unlike your classical UFO-conspiracy nut, to get people to believe "their truth". They aren't interested in the truth at all, but in actively undermining it. They do not care about consistency; indeed, through its mockery of "elitistic" logic, inconsistency is even a virtue to a fake news peddler. They are not on a moral crusade; unlike the truly devout nutters who will persist no matter the odds, once their audience is denied to a fake news outlet, they wither and die. Fake news serves no purpose whatever if it can't reach a large audience, which necessitates an unavoidable degree of exposure. A traditional loon at least cares about their idea and earnestly believes it; a hyperpartisan political outlet at least wants you to believe the other side is evil; but a fake news outlet cares about the size of their audience and not much else. Going underground is a much use to a fake news vendor as a chocolate submarine.

Thus, classical objections to censorship do not apply when it comes to fake news. Removing it will not provoke any more than the most minimal sort of backfire effect. It will cause little or no wider effort in the populace to seek out the forbidden fruit, since everyone already knows the nonsense being offered. It may cause a brief strengthening of belief in those gullible enough to have been persuaded (either in the information itself or in terms of trust in the source), but, now utterly lacking any independent sources of confirmation, this will fade. While indeed there are circumstances in which forbidding discussions can have the opposite of the intended effect, fake news is not one of them. Regardless of whether you can educate people into spotting bullshit, you can most certainly prevent them holding the highly specific, sometimes dangerous beliefs fostered by propaganda.

Nor does this need to curtail such deceipt lead to a slippery slope towards latter-day Stalinism. The key point is context. Discussing misinformation in universities or on analytical news programs is wholly and utterly different from its outright promotion on social media. The problem with the whole "marketplace of ideas" analogy often used is... well, take a look at Apple how much useless stuff people buy. A completely unrestricted marketplace is never, ever a good idea - people are prone to wanting things that are bad for them; at the same time, a totalitarian marketplace which only sells, say, vegan health foods is pretty awful as well. Nobody in their right mind should want either of these preposterous extremes.

So I welcome this call to deal far more severely with misinformation :

But CCDH says the public needs an easier way to flag misinformation about the disease than at present. The lack of such a dedicated button creates a "barrier to action", the group's chief executive, Imran Ahmed, told the BBC, discouraging users from hunting through the options to report offending posts. 

The CCDH chief is also concerned that users are often encouraged to block or mute the reported accounts. That means "you don't see the reality, which is that they might delete a post, but very rarely delete accounts," he said. He has called for the deliberate spreading of misinformation to be made an offence - and says Facebook and other social networks should take action against the administrators of groups containing the posts 

"[Tech firms] act on it if it poses imminent physical harm, but if it's other information - like conspiracy theories - then that doesn't meet their test as to if an item should be removed," Mr Collins said, before YouTube toughened its policy relating to 5G. "There's not necessarily a blanket ban on misinformation about Covid-19."

Making it easier to report misinformation in general would be a good thing. Should it be an offence ? To a degree, and it should be as complicated as any other offence. Stealing a loaf of bread is clearly not the same as stealing the Mona Lisa or a baby or robbing an orphanage. We would do well to have a "report misinformation" button in general, but it doesn't follow that someone trying to sell homeopathy recipes to cure baldness is the same as someone trying to incite you to burn down a mobile phone tower or throw a party in the middle of a pandemic. Or that a guy yelling about the end of the world on a street corner is the same as a well-organised, highly-funded botnet sending out mass messages of phoney cures for a deadly disease. Sometimes you need to remove content, sometimes you need to remove accounts entirely. It is unavoidably messy, but that doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't act.

Apps 'need dedicated fake coronavirus news button'

Social networks need a dedicated button to flag up bogus coronavirus-related posts, an advocacy group has said. The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) said the apps had "missed a trick" in combating the problem.