Mal Fletcher comments on the rise in phoney news and analyses the potential future implications.

The survey was conducted across a number of developed nations, among what its authors called the news-gathering public - the people who like to keep themselves well informed.

Even among these news-hungry folks, media was found to be one of the core cultural institutions leaking public trust.

A number of other surveys, conducted mainly in the US, suggest that one reason for this is that reporting has morphed into commentary. Reporters and entire media companies have become much more collegiate toward one side of politics, for example, and openly antipathic toward another.

If journalism cannot keep its distance from political factions and maintain an obvious objectivity, people who already mistrust the media might easily disengage from "real" news altogether.

This would rob the wider community of some of its most insightful minds, removing important checks on the rise of online fakery.

Fake Avatars

A third impact of fake news will be the advent of fake avatars. We are already fast approaching an age of avatarism.

Avatars are simply digital "personalities" devised to represent us in the digital world. In a sense, every social media account you have today is driven by an avataric representation of you. My Instagram and Twitter feeds are driven by an "entity", controlled by me, which is called "@malfletcher".

Of course, I use the term "entity" carefully because at this point in time my Twitter avatar is completely reliant on me for content. However, soon we will invest online avatars with much greater power, as we seek to simplify our cluttered online experience.

Imagine a time when you have so many social media and other Cloud-based accounts and interests that you pay someone to devise one avatar for all of your online experiences. Or perhaps you'd be happy to have a handful of avatars - perhaps one for all shopping and banking, another for family life and a third for social and cultural engagement.

At that point, avatars will likely lose some of the boring two dimensional quality they have today. They may become well-rounded characterisations of you - or even slight improvements on you - complete with personality tweaks to suit their use.

In time, avatars may become capable of making independent decisions based on algorithms that "know" how you will likely respond in any given situation.

We already have algorithms suggesting what we might want to buy - or buy next - on Amazon, Spotify and Kindle. When we Google search a subject, bots point us first to pages they "believe" we're most likely to want to read. Both mechanisms are based on our past web buying or browsing history.

The downside of this is the we become locked into "bubble think", a form of confirmation bias in which we're only ever exposed to ideas that support our existing beliefs. We end up never hearing a dissenting voice or learning anything new.