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Law360 (May 11, 2020, 10:39 PM EDT) -- A public interest group pushed Monday for the creation of an internet "Superfund" to correct online misinformation the same way the government cleans up toxic waste sites.
Public Knowledge says the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the need for reliable, fact-based information and scrubbing the internet of so-called fake news, addressing what the World Health Organization has termed an "infodemic" spreading faster than the disease. Local news organizations would pitch in with the effort.
Washington, D.C.-based Public Knowledge — which says its goal is to back free speech and an open internet and shape policy in the public interest — came out with its own plan to fight fake news. The concept is analogous to the Superfund, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency program used to clean up sites riddled with toxic chemicals.
Similar proposals have been floated in the blogosphere, some based on a model of taxing giant internet platforms like Facebook that are often blamed for enabling proliferation of fake news. Public Knowledge is not behind that funding model, a policy analyst for the group said Monday. It's not yet clear how much an internet "Superfund" would cost or be paid for.
Lisa Macpherson, a senior policy fellow at Public Knowledge, told Law360 that a proliferation of three types of fake news about the coronavirus pandemic demonstrates why such a Superfund is necessary: public health misinformation about the origins of the virus; unproved treatments and cures; and COVID-19's varied impacts on different groups.
Rumors and falsehoods spread on the internet are especially dangerous in each of these areas, in her view. "Unfortunately, they all carry enormous risks," she said. Unproven information about the precise virus origins can stoke hyperpartisan debate; unsafe treatments can cause personal harm; and unfounded data about various groups can heighten racism, bias and even hate crimes, she said.
Macpherson said the internet Superfund idea is still in the early stages, but she thinks model legislation will be offered soon. She noted that getting resources to local journalism outlets, many of which are struggling, has been a bipartisan effort and could help combat misinformation.
Public Knowledge supports getting the large tech platforms like Google and Facebook to chip into the proposed fund, but doesn't back what it views as "punitive" taxes on ad revenues.
"Given the enormous and now proven value of information analysis to support public health and institutions, we can imagine, and are now developing, a solution in which platforms are compelled to invest much more in the tools and approaches that work," Macpherson wrote in a Monday blog post.
"We favor an approach of value creation, since the pandemic has given us such a powerful model for its benefits. It has essentially created a market in which the platforms have more demand for — and journalistic organizations have more supply of — information cleansing services," she wrote.
"The platforms should pay for these services to help to clear the toxic junk from their platforms, at a fair price," Macpherson wrote. "In doing so, we can provide an essential new revenue stream to local journalistic organizations and information analysts who also help protect our public and democratic institutions."
"We may never know how much of the platforms' efforts to counter misinformation during the pandemic were part of a larger strategy to reverse 'the techlash narrative' and the momentum toward regulation that had been building over the past few years," according to the blog. "But [their] efforts shouldn't be reliant on their continued good will and philanthropy, and in the absence of oversight."
Public Knowledge said it has been tracking the efforts of digital platforms to counter the "rumors, misinformation and flat-out lies" about COVID-19 that now appear on the internet at "alarming speed and volume."
Google and Facebook didn't immediately respond to press inquiries late Monday.
--Editing by Bruce Goldman.
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