Social media has become hugely influential. What started with the vision to let people connect and share personal stories has turned into a major source of information for the global population. It is estimated that facebook alone delivers political news to two thirds of the US population. source

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While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this, having such a huge market share comes with massive power. Facebooks algorithms decide who gets to see what and if certain stories should be hidden. (And here I am only talking about the power to be the editor of the newsfeeds. On top there are troubles with advertising, selling data and working together with the sate and secret services.)

With great power comes great responsibility

... is often said. Facebook can and is using their power. Peoples opinions are like little stones bouncing on a rattling plate. Tilt that plate a bit and they all start moving in the same direction. It does not take much to give people the impression that a lot of their friends have changed political opinion and that will have a small but steady impact on the people.
All facebook has to do is spread right wing opinions a few % more than left wing opinions and watch the entire population move to the right.

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This power and abuse thereof becomes more noticed in the mainstream, but the open question is what to do about it? The initial reaction was that facebook should self-censor. Hateful messages and fake news need to be deleted by facebook. The algorithms that manage the newsfeed should be neutral (even though nobody knows how that should work. It was recently found that neural networks tend to discriminate against women, because they do not favour causation over correlation. When they analyse historic data in which most scientists are male, they learn that men are better at science and will discriminate against suitable female candidates. Solutions to this bias are known but hard to implement and very much currently debated in science. )

But what happens when facebook is held responsible for detecting fake news? We then create a corporate entity that is responsible for judging truth! I think this notion raises more problems than it answers. Facebook is already engineering what we see, we do not need even more pressure to do so.

While the mainstream is still preaching that facebook needs to moderate, controll and censor their out of controll platform, there are only two real options in this dilemma:

Centralise Social Networks

While tho voices for this option are still rather quiet, it is the logical plan and will certainly be promoted in the future. Only wait until the people really turn against facebook, which is when the state will try step in big time. The state claim that it needs to 'protect' us from fake news and hate speech. Therefore they need to regulate facebook and other social media and install powerful controll instances in these companies.

Initially this is likely to improve the situation, but we have created a monster. The state is directly controlling media, and not only the big corporate one, but also every individual user. All posts and comments will be filtered and free speech on these platforms will be effectively lost.

The power to abuse such a system is endless. It is bad enough that facebook influences us and know almost everything about us. But when this is the state, that can use violence against us and jail us for our opinions (of course only to protect us from ourselves), we have finally lost most of our freedoms.

Communication has to be free, open and private. The state will come after this claiming to fight fake news and hate speech. But in the process they will turn facebook into the biggest surveillance and propaganda machine ever seen.

Decentralise Social Networks

All of the problems with facebook could also be challenged by the opposite path, to decentralise social media. When nobody is in charge, nobody can abuse the non-existing power.

But this will not end fake news! However fake news are not the real problem. The problem with facebook is that some fake news gets more attention solely based on the decisions of a central party. That power to decide who gets an audience is the real problem. And we can take that power away (and in fact have already here on steem).

Fake news have always existed and will continue to do so as long as there are humans on this planet. We need to learn to deal with it. Distrust others, check sources, think for yourself. There is no easy shortcut. Current centralised networks make it hard for users to do that. Adds look like they come from your friends. The news is preselected for you and placed in-between the posts of your friends. You do not have the controll to decide what you want to see.

But inviting the state for help cannot solve the fundamental problem. The only society where people are protected from fake news is the society where people are no longer freely to speak their mind, and these are usually not the societies where one wants to be in.

Decentralisation will give us our power back. I read what I want, unfiltered and selected by me myself alone. I choose how to interpret what I read. I post my opinion no matter what it is. Others can read it and there is no obscure mechanism determining the spread of my information.
How do we make sure that nobody is abusing the system and using it to manipulate or censor us? Simply because there is nobody in charge and nobody has that power in the first place. Not me, not the developers and especially not the state.
Bad speech is cannot be countered by censorship. Bad speech is countered by more good speech.

(Also, where is the dangerous hate speech on steem? Where are all those horrible posts that need to be censored. Steem is a true experiment in human niceness. Because when your payout depends on others upvoting/downvoting your content then nice behaviour does not need to be brought into the system by force. It is a natural feature of the network. )