Around the world, ‘fake news’ or disinformation is of the newest phenomena that has causing problems. Russian propaganda has messed up with the US elections which most likely have given Donald Trump the Presidency while here in the Philippines, die-hard supporters of President Rodrigo Duterte has succeeded in hijacking the public discourse with its army of online trolls. Congress has already conducted hearings, debates continue to rage on in academic circles, the public space and on social media sites. What can we do?

Tom Wheeler, a former Chairman of the US Federal Communications Commission has a proposal:

The government should require social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to use a similar open application programming interface. This would make it possible for third parties to build software to monitor and report on the effects of social media algorithms. (This idea has been proposed by Wael Ghonim, the Egyptian Google employee who helped organize the Tahrir Square uprising in 2011.) To be clear, the proposal is not to force companies to open up their algorithms — just the results of the algorithms. The goal is to make it possible to understand what content is fed into the algorithms and how the algorithms distribute that content. Who created the information or advertisement? And to what groups of users was it directed? An open application programming interface would therefore threaten neither a social media platform’s intellectual property nor the privacy of its individual users.

The question is, would Facebook, Twitter and other social-media entities open up?