Fake news has become one of the most important issues of our time, and Microsoft is one of the tech companies showing the most concern about this problem. It’s completely understandable, after all, fake news has already been shown the damage they can cause both economically, socially and politically.

Along those lines, I think it’s important to point out that there are other deep issues that ultimately greatly influence the success of fake news. One of them is educational, that is, the lack of knowledge of many people to be able to reason whether something can be false or not, which would be Cognitive abilitiesand another is in free capacity, which we can define as the desire to act on the basis of a specific motivation, and from which it follows that many people are inclined to believe false news that matches their interests, beliefs or motivations. Fits the classic “how can it be fake when it says exactly what I think” meme.

If you are wondering why fake news is used so much, the reason is very simple because they make it possible to influence and manipulate large masses, and because they have a huge reach through social media. The passivity of these is also another of the big culprits that have reached almost “pandemic” levels, and that we have reached the point where we confuse freedom of expression and censorship with a very important key, the truth of information. .

Microsoft has done a thorough assessment of this issue and concluded that labeling fake news as fake news, which is exactly what it is no matter how many times we try to deliver it, can be interpreted as a form of censorship. Instead of looking for and flagging content that qualifies as fake news, it could choose to expose the clients and agencies involved in the creation and distribution of propaganda.

This presents another problem in that it further complicates the identification of fake news because it requires the user to have greater cognitive ability to associate that the message is false from its author. It seems absurd that we are afraid to call a spade a spadeand it horrifies me to think that by doing so we are empowering and facilitating lies and misinformation. Microsoft doesn’t seem to have figured it out.

Labeling news as fake when it really is it is not censorship nor does it in any way limit the right to freedom of expression. Lying with the intention of manipulating a person or a mass of people can never fit into the idea of ​​free speech and that is exactly what is happening with fake news. It must also be clear to us that fake news is not an opinion that may contain more or less truth, it is a report, an article that aims to inform, or rather misinform, to generate that manipulation and influence to achieve a certain goal. or prevent others from achieving theirs. This is a very serious issue and cannot be taken lightly.