I always think a simple measure that would fix the toxicity in social media is to adopt the "right to answer" that worked for ages in the newspaper business.
It works by obliging the newspaper to print a correction at the same location as where they published the original piece (that was proved wrong in a court-of-peers of some sort).
It acts as an effective check because the right to answer would reach the same audience as the original fake piece and the credibility of the newspaper would decline.
In social media, fake news spreads virally and there is very little recourse except tweeting a correction and hoping it goes equally viral.
A simple law could require for-profit publishers of fake news to ensure a similar audience (retargeting or newly paid) reads the correction.
That would destroy all the profit of publishing fake news, while reducing the credibility of the fake news publisher effectively.
Identifying "fake news" in a non-partisan way is required for the consequences of such a law to be non-partisan, but is probably not possible with real humans. So instead you would get a Ministry of Truth that identifies fake news as that which is disapproved of by the party.
The Russian state is currently busy crushing independent journalism in just that way with their recent fake news law.
This applies to basically the entire spectrum of humanity, not just readers of “fake news”.
For example NYT published all kinds of hyperbolic garbage the last 2.5 years that scared the living daylights out of their readers. It took them better part of an entire year before they stopped saying that the IFR for Covid was 4%, despite there being ample real world data to suggest it was several orders of magnitude lower. Will they ever publish a correction for that? Is what they published “fake news”? I mean the figure they published was based on some sketchy model made by a person with a long history of publishing sketchy models… some “expert” said it was true, so it has to be right?
“Fake news” is just a way to dismiss anything that isn’t aligned with the current dogma. Plenty of “fake news” turned out to be quite real over the course of the last two years.
And yes there is actual fake news out there. But too many people think that whatever they are reading isn’t also “fake news”. Everybody needs to think critically about what they read. Just because NYT or The Atlantic said it doesn’t mean it is true either.
It can far more often than not. However certain parties have a vested interest in pushing the narrative that all news is equally fake and that any attempt to distinguish truth from lies is simply propaganda.
It's epistemology 101. Absolute truth can never be determined. So we must inherently use imperfect method of approximating the truth. Those approximations are open to criticism, so any system that determines fake news will necessarily have to take a 'stance' in some situations: it will politicize and reflect the biases of those administrating the system.
For example not long ago I saw some "news" segment going around twitter saying a paper showed that the COVID mRNA vaccines where gene therapy. The paper said no such thing, it wasn't even a slight misinterpretation but an outright lie.
It works by obliging the newspaper to print a correction at the same location as where they published the original piece (that was proved wrong in a court-of-peers of some sort).
It acts as an effective check because the right to answer would reach the same audience as the original fake piece and the credibility of the newspaper would decline.
In social media, fake news spreads virally and there is very little recourse except tweeting a correction and hoping it goes equally viral.
A simple law could require for-profit publishers of fake news to ensure a similar audience (retargeting or newly paid) reads the correction.
That would destroy all the profit of publishing fake news, while reducing the credibility of the fake news publisher effectively.