Cyber Future Dialogue Resolution

“Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet63.” This is one of the most popular memes widely present on line; hoaxes have found a perfect means to diffuse thanks to the Internet. Hoaxes: this relevant topic has gained the stage thanks to the impact that such news can have on the public. Abuse and misuse of digital means in the transition phase between traditional consolidated journalism and digital news may cause relevant problems. Without the traditional approach including the validation of news thanks to multiple trustable sources, the proliferation of “fake” news, once “inoculated” on the Internet, is similar to the behaviour of a virus. Sometimes it starts from a tweet and in a glimpse is broadcasted on blogs and independent news sites; then it takes some time to identify the information as fake. Many times, this time gap is enough to have the required effect on the audience, many times it is not; as it happens anyway even in traditional media, the same visibility and audience’s interest takes into account the journalistic correction. While waiting for a top-down mitigation of this problem we can exercise some basic precautions to avoid using a single source of social media and, more specifically, the instant messages coming from an unknown source; always check the sources of the news and possibly cross-check them; look for specific sources strictly related to the specific topic, their location; if is the case check directly in the official documenta- tion or on Institutional sites. Apart from some regulatory plans and directives the community of technicians is working on some potential approaches to minimise the arm. Facebook is one of the platforms suffering for the broadcasting of fake news. The company has issued a new set of media guidelines that it hopes will improve the News Feed’s algorithms and filter out fake news. However, now Facebook’s fact- checkers are speaking out, and their perspective is a grim one. On November 2017 The Guardian published an article entitled “‘Way too little, way too late’: Facebook’s fact-checkers say effort is failing”. Journalists working for Facebook say the social media site’s fact-checking tools have largely failed; the reporters also lamented that Facebook had refused to disclose data on its efforts to stop the dissemination of fake news. The dissemination of fake news and the consequent need to check the level of trust we can assign to each information we receive through digital channels pose the additional problem to consider the potential impact of cyber technologies on public opinion. The actual average trend of public opinion to assign mayor trust to information received from social media and related channels expose public opinion to the risk to be manipulated in many ways to reach specific goals, let’s term it “propaganda”67. This is the traditional effect of propaganda once vehiculated by printing press or leaflets later by television programs and news. One of the main differences is due to the fact that the present “generation” of propaganda it is not easily reconnected to the originators and on the other side the sources of these misinformation or disinforma- tion campaigns should be cyber agents. “Crowds are influenced mainly by images produced by judicious employment of words and formulas” (Gustave Le Bon)