The $78 billion-dollar Elvis
The British House of Commons defines fake news as "the deliberate creation and sharing of false and/or manipulated information that is intended to deceive and mislead audiences, either for the purposes of causing harm, or for political, personal or financial gain."
Here’s why that’s interesting.
Unless they’re indicting all corporate media as fake news (“deliberate… for political or financial gain”), they’re not even talking about the hard stuff.
This isn’t “NYT v Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself.”
This is “Elvis is still alive v No he isn’t.”
This is low-hanging-ass fruit.
Which means according to this report, “Elvis is still alive v No he isn’t” is a $78-billion-per-year problem.
Which Google alone is spending $300 million on.
Let’s save Google that $300 million.
In the past, fake news was easy to create, because malicious actors only needed to do two things:
buy a newsy-sounding domain
create a newsy-looking website
This is why Ideamarket measures credibility in dollars, and not appearances.
Measuring credibility in dollars makes credibility far more expensive to fake.
Imagine the public only trusts the top 1000 Twitter accounts. And account #1000 has $1 million in deposits behind it.
Anyone who wants to be taken seriously will need to spend at least $1 million to do it — or fool the public into risking $1 million on their behalf.
“Fooling the public is easy!” you reply.
Maybe.
But once the public has a thousand honest voices to depend on — well-paid, highly scrutinized, and instantly replaceable — what can liars do?
The quest for truth is out of Facebook’s hands at that point. It’s out of Google’s hands. It’s out of Twitter’s hands.
It’s in the invisible hand.
—Mike