Back in February, a bunch of smarty-pants academics gathered in Boston to brainstorm strategies to combat fake news. Now, they have issued a final report.

Ready for this? Here's the key excerpt:

There are some possible pathways for reducing fake news, including: (1) offering feedback to users that particular news may be fake (which seems to depress overall sharing from those individuals); (2) providing ideologically compatible sources that confirm that particular news is fake; (3) detecting information that is being promoted by bots and “cyborg” accounts and tuning algorithms to not respond to those manipulations; and (4) because a few sources may be the origin of most fake news, identifying those sources and reducing promotion (by the platforms) of information from those sources.

All four of these “pathways” make sense, but trust issues seem likely to undermine the effectiveness of Nos. 1, 3 and 4. If Facebook says a certain story is fake, or a particular information source is unreliable, or a seemingly-popular article is getting an artificial boost from bots, some users — particularly conservative ones — might suspect ideological censorship.

It has been only a year since Gizmodo reported that some Facebook workers who curated the social network’s trending news section allowed their own (mostly liberal) political views to influence which stories qualify for promotion in a special box on users’ homepages. Facebook responded by hosting a meeting with prominent conservatives, in an effort to rebuild trust, and adding political bias training for employees.

Despite these efforts, it is safe to say that some conservatives do not trust Facebook (or Twitter, or much of the media) to tell them what is legit and what is not.

That’s why the report’s second recommendation — “providing ideologically compatible sources that confirm that particular news is fake” — is actually pretty brilliant.

Maybe you’re skeptical when The Washington Post attempts to debunk the myth of the paid anti-Trump protester. But maybe you’ll believe Fox News host and Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson when he does the same thing.

This is somewhat anecdotal, but it sure feels like there has been a decline in fake stories about paid protesters in the roughly four months since Carlson exposed a bogus company called Demand Protest that had been covered as real by the Drudge Report, Washington Times, Gateway Pundit, Townhall and other conservative news outlets.

In January, on his prime-time show, Carlson confronted the “founder” of Demand Protest, which purported to offer professional protesters $2,500 monthly retainers and $50 per hour, plus health, vision and dental insurance. Such a payment plan is outlandish, of course, but some supporters of President Trump readily believed it was proof that opposition to Trump is manufactured.

“On your website, you claim that you pay a retainer to 1,817 operatives every month,” Carlson said on the air to the founder, who goes by the assumed name Dom Tullipso. “Now, if that were actually true, that’s $54 million a year you’re spending just on retainers. It’s over $30 million a year if you’re paying them for six-hours-a-week work. That’s demonstrably — you’re not doing that.”

“Is it an effort to convince conservative news organizations to pick up the story and therefore highlight their gullibility?” Carlson asked later.

Tullipso’s answer was, basically, yes: “I mean, it’s pretty darn easy these days to just say whatever the heck you want on national TV and have it pass off as truth. And, you know, it’s pretty — I don’t know, just pretty incredible to me how easy it was to get the coverage we got.”

According to the report by the experts at Harvard and Northeastern University (my alma mater!), fighting fake news requires more help from the likes of Carlson. The experts are on to something.