Why is the government well suited to declare what it and isn't misinformation though?
Shouldn't we farm that out to a third party?
Shouldn't we farm that out to a third party?
Presumably because much of the lies and disinformation going around involves them to start with. When some nutjob starts posting about something like millions of American citizens being locked up in FEMA camps, or claiming that a proposed healthcare bill calls for the formation of a government death panel any respectable fact checking org is going to end up asking the lawmakers and FEMA about it anyway so government certainly has a role here.
Ideally, each social media platform would have their own people catching and flagging the worst examples of disinformation and that might also involve enlisting the services of both governments and vetted independent third parties.
In my limited experience on social media where I don't see any official flags for misinformation I've seen plenty of cases where it's other users stepping in and correcting outright lies and common misconceptions complete with sources. That probably works better in some spaces than others though.
But let's take something we now know to be true: the NSA collecting data on US citizens. Pre-Snowden, someone could post something asserting that the NSA is spying on us. The government, being the hypothetical arbiter of what is and isn't misinformation, would of course immediately label that as misinformation.
You can't trust the government to be honest here. Sometimes they will even lie for fairly good reasons. But I don't want them marking things as misinformation (or, worse, suppressing such information) when it's true. And they certainly will do that, sometimes.
As long as the fact checking is transparent, there will be an incentive for the fact checker to stay honest and when they fail we should adjust our understanding of what the flag actually means.
I've gone through that already with popular fact checkers like snopes. I still consider it to be a valuable resource, but I've become aware that they allow bias to influence their findings and that they can't be trusted blindly. Really no one source should be blindly trusted and that's something we should be trying to let people know, but warning labels can still be helpful and also revealing about how adversarial our government has become. A government that can't be trusted not to repeatedly mislead the public is one that should be voted out and replaced.