A 12-Month Campaign of Fake News to Influence Elections Costs $400K

I don't have any strong suggestions on point 3, but there are some tools we could leverage for the other two. We have done things like this for other industries and sometimes it works well.

First, we need a list of news companies that self identify as such. Second, we need a group of people who aren't the executive or legislative branch to act as watchdogs with a solid set of rules, next we laws stating what the punishments are for lies and finally we need to limit who can say they provide "News".

We have a number of non-profit groups for those that self-identify as journalists. Some of those help organize or train people. A new one could be created or one of those could create a listing of self identifying news companies. If that is unsuitable (and the FCC weren't our enemy) then the FCC could directly maintain such a list. We Good success creating such lists, consider Voting Testing Labs (labs that test voting machines), none are run by the government, but they all follow government rules.

If non-profits or private groups are doing the list keeping then they have extra leverage to kick out news organizations s, but that is not strictly required. As long as someone can de-list a news company for extreme violation and punish for minor ones. This could be the courts, but doesn't have to be as long its it is not the people making the laws or holding the lists. A consortium of people from the industry would likely be an ideal list keeper, and they could also make rules without getting the involved too much.

Then we need clearly spelled rules on "lying". It doesn't have to actually be lying, which requires intent, it can be a level of habitual innacuracy on a given topic. It doesn't matter if it was intentional, but if your news org kept saying something demonstrably false about one candidate or one topic the watchdogs will jump in and try to leverage the rule to punish that news org. Bonus points if we can somehow get the news companies to be watchdogging each other, again the cosortium of news organizations could help with this.

Then finally "news" companies that cannot play with this kind of oversight don't get to use the word "News" to describe themselves, or in Trademarks, Logos or Names. We could also incentive people to become news organizations by providing tax breaks and using groups like the ad council to tout the advantage of news companies over entertainment companies. It would take a long time before we trusted it, but in the long I think something like this could create a stable self-correcting governing for responsible news reporting. We might have parts of this already I only have superficial knowledge that industry, this is largely transplanting ideas from other places.

If we’re making decisions that could have been predicted, on the basis on known scientific evidence, to lead to measurably worse outcomes, I’d argue that does indeed make those decisions less valid.

There’s a troubling tendency these days to discredit scientific expertise, or to mischaracterize it as partisan. It’s insane to imagine that we can forever hide behind arbitrary (and, often, deeply problematic) value systems to ignore the available expertise, knowledge, and data. You can't move water uphill with morality.