Distributed Fact Checking: An Antidote to Fake News and Manipulative InformationBio

Features
21

If Mike Tyson gets a free punch straight on your bare jaw, is it going to hurt?!

This idea that nothing is objectively true, is objectively wrong…

Maidsafe and no other technology could exist if everything in life was subjective!

I think particularly in regards to the growing abilities of deep fakes that there will be a need for technical solutions to verify legitimate content. But this hard press for online social media to become the proxy arbiters of truth is backdoor censorship and an insidious attempt to control mass public opinion via the Internet. The free-press has always been judged by its perceived ability to fact-check, so it’s not exactly a new idea, and all power to that as long as it’s within a free-market basis and these fact-checkers factoids aren’t forced upon society, but that’s the regulatory direction its influential proponents are hurtling us towards. I’d rather our education systems focused on teaching the difference between subjective and objective. That would be by far the most empowering option for everyone and least open to corruption. I’d highly recommend Thomas Reid on this subject.

1 Like
22

I only see something like the originally proposed license system going horribly wrong. People have already shown that current fact checkers (such as “factcheck.org”), are biased. The problem is, people place their own biases when “fact checking” pieces and can attribute scores to that item in an unfairly positive or negative manner.

I don’t want to get into the subjective vs objective argument, but I will say that there’s certainly instances where an interpretation of an event, action, or item can be perceived in different ways by different people and that can lead to bias in what that person perceives as a “fact”. I do not want to leave it to the whims of others what I believe to be true and not. We need to nurture critical thinking of every individual, not pass it off to others and then blindly believe whatever they think to be true.

2 Likes