So, tell me what would you do.  You find out that one of your sites is being populated by someone who is promoting a canard. To denigrate someone else’s point of view, he’s claiming a young person is a trained actor, spewing words he was told to memorize, and doing it badly.

Now, couple that with the fact that Google, Facebook, and Twitter KNOW (yes, that’s capitalized on purpose) that their sites have been manipulated by bots via North Korean and Russian operatives to create havoc in our country (and Europe, too).  So much so that Google just hired 10,000 folks to examine postings and eradicate those of questionable pedigree.

Have you decided yet?

Let’s make it less theoretical.  After Nicholas Cruz shot up the high school in Parkland (FL), survivors (many of whom are still suffering from PTSD) began speaking out, began egging on the lethargic state and federal legislatures to remove their hands from their asses (or is that from the NRA lobbyists?) and start enacting some protections for American citizens, who are being terrorized by gunman.  (Tell me again why we need to ensure that nukes are removed from North Korea? If it’s not guns that kill people, then it’s neither nuclear weapons that do, either.)

David Hogg was the student in question, a survivor of the Parkland shooting.  And, it was YouTube that darkened the site of the perpetrator of the canard.

Except, that person was  Jerome Corsi.  Who’s Jerome Corsi?  None other than a sidekick of the insane Alex Jones, head of Infowars.  You know, Infowars is the proponent of any conspiracy theory as long as it confuses and confounds.

So, YouTube’s action was then reversed by Google (the owner of YouTube), with an apology saying their new censors weren’t fully trained.

Except, maybe they were.  Because we don’t need these kinds of trolls confusing folks.

But, there is hope on the horizon.  At least, if you never thought the founder of American Lawyer, Court TV, or Content magazine was a little too sensationalist.

You see, Steven Brill, a 67-year-old escapee from Queens (who went to Yale for college and law school, not too shabby), plans to start-up NewsGuard.  He and his partner Gordon Crovitz  have amassed some $ 6 million in venture capital to fund this new venture.

Newsguard plans to be the “Snopes” or “Good Housekeeping” for news.  The site, using a combination of human beings and AI (artificial intelligence)  will rate some 7500 sources of news, using the same kind of color coding that President Bush used to warn us about terrorist threats. Not only would they verify which site or publication was generally trustworthy, consistently biased or inaccurate, or even deliberately deceptive, but Newsguard would provide a pedigree for each reviewed site.  Who owns it, the journalistic track record, and its publication or site history.

Brill and Crovitz plan to have Newsguard ready to go before the heat of the midterm elections (that means Labor Day of this year, 2018).   That’s a big jump from the 100 sites they’ve already analyzed- only 7400 more to go in 6 months!

Newsguard plans to have these indicators show up on Facebook and Google, when a site’s info is shared; the problem is that it’s not clear that Google or Facebook plan to let his new venture do so.

To top if off, Facebook, Google, Bing, Twitter, the Washington Post and YouTube have already cut a deal with the Trust Project.  While the Trust Project does not have quite the same goals- in that it will only  disclose ethics and standards for news sources- they have the imprimatur of those sites.  (Those providers are trying to cover their tracks- after all,  they’ve been passing along the least reliable of news to us.)

Let’s hope both of these projects are ready to go by the mid-term elections.  So, we can choose to ignore- or, at the very least, not succumb- to the siren songs those “fake news” sites provide.  We need to differentiate between  “fake news” and those true declarations  that roil TheDonald, which he illegitimately deplores.