In their 2018 book Truth Decay, Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael D. Rich of the RAND Corporation wrote about the role news publishers and broadcasters play in mediating information — separating fact from fiction. They differentiated between those businesses and Big Tech platforms, arguing that because the former can be sued for defamation and hold themselves to journalistic standards, they remain accountable.

According to Kavanagh and Rich, “the filters and algorithms embedded in social media platforms and search engines, such as Google, contribute to Truth Decay — and particularly to increasing disagreement and the blurring of the distinction between opinion and fact — by inserting bias into the types of information a person is likely to encounter or engage with.”

In the seven years since

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