How Fake Is Our Debate On 'Fake News'?

Danah Boyd perfectly shows what is missing most from Silicon Valley: sociologists. Her short article in Backchannel is an invitation to think and look at the structures which produce and reproduce existing technologies. Trying to map the popular debate on what is now called "fake news", she cautiously puts some light on the elephant in the dark, i.e. the underlying socio-economic conditions that have created the dominant techno-utopian mindset of the coders, or in Lawrence Lessig’s words, its lawmakers. Drawing on her extensive experience as a social researcher at big tech firms such as Blogger, Twitter and Yahoo, she makes a case for the complexity of reporting and policing cyberspace for emotional abuse, be it individual (like verbal harassment or trolling) or collective (as in fake news, etc). The brief article seems like raw material for a long essay, or a book, which should shake and shock Silicon Valley, but only if they stop reading—or actually watching—fake analyses, from which the term "fake news" stems.