Comment by js8
4 hours ago
I don't understand why people who don't like fake news and manipulation won't embrace the social graph as a public good.
If enough people were willing to publicly certify that their fellow contacts are human, anybody could then assign trust to each social graph node based on the trust they have in the path to them. It would completely decentralize the algorithms and remove the fake accounts as less trustworthy.
I think people tried this with PGP but it never really caught on.
It doesn't scale as a consumer good. Letting go of consumerist habits is just as hard as breaking any other habit.
Also, it could just as easily be faked, like so much else. Even if someone offered such an assurance, I wouldn't trust random strangers on the internet. At best it would become an arms race between "this is not a real person" and those who sell fake assurances. And it would be one more weapon to damage anyone's reputation you don't like. "not a real person!"
I am not really sure how it could be faked. The fake assurance, in order to work, must be connected to you.
By default you could choose not to trust. If you don't trust random strangers it's OK. So I don't see how it would damage someone's reputation worse than today.
It would potentially only add trust. Arguably, today we have bots because we have no other option than to trust without justification. With the public social graph, the trust above the baseline would be justifiable.
Then go and implement it. Either you make the world a better place or you learn how collision with reality impacts ideas.
The social graph is the source of the fake news and manipulation. Before social media the social graph was email and it was all the same slop and misinformation. Before that it was literally physical mail. Look up chain letters. Truly nothing is new.
If I certify my racist thanksgiving ruining uncle is a real person that doesn’t actually help you avoid misinformation.
I honestly don’t care if the information I consume comes from a person or a robot. I only care if it is accurate or not. Those dimensions are orthogonal.
I don't think you understand what I mean by public social graph. What I mean is that anybody could publish or withdraw statements of two forms:
- "I, owner of account A, certify that owner of account B is human."
- "I, owner of account C, have a reason to trust/distrust the certification of account A about account B."
The collection of these statements would be the public social graph.
The social graph would then be used to establish provenance of facts, which are statements of the form:
- "I, owner of account B, certify account A being witness to event X."
Now whether to believe this or not depends on whether A certified B to be a human, and how much you transitively believe that statement.
So there is a kind of reversal - your statement about your uncle being human helps him to certify what you say, and vice versa.