Something Matt said at the end of episode 55, of The No Dumb Questions podcast hit a nail on the head for me. He made the point that people are acting dishonestly when they create content online that is designed to deceive viewers.
The Problem
You can't keep people from being dishonest.1 False information has spread via social media and general purpose internet servers.2 There's just no practical way without locking people up to keep dishonesty from happening. Long before we had electronic sharing via networks, plenty of chain letters and misleading letters were sent via postal systems. This means that veracity, or factual accuracy, can't be controlled in a real-time sense in large groups (like the internet). The battle to check the accuracy of messages is a war we probably should not be in, as it wastes time and effort better spent elsewhere.
So, if we cannot keep people from being dishonest, what can we do to separate fact from fiction?
A Solution
Instead of policing accuracy, I think we should focus on authenticity of messengers and integrity of authentic messages. By this I mean verifying authentic messengers and safeguarding those verified accounts from impersonation and confusion.
For example, individuals of public interest, such as Bill Gates or the President of Russia, have verified Twitter accounts. Both have been verified by Twitter as actually belonging to those persons. These messengers can be trusted, to a certain amount, to speak for the individuals behind the account. I am sure that actual day to day operation of these accounts is shared with members of their staffs, but the accountability of that individual to what their account tweets is reliable, to a certain degree.
Authenticity
First, we authenticate the messengers. If we positively know who is speaking, we can judge the speaker on their past actions and accuracy. The first step in this is creating a registry of verified accounts. A registry is just a registration of users with their account information and a method of securely verifying their identity when they are online. This could be within a specific user-base, such as Twitter, or Facebook, or Instagram, etc. We could also have a verification registry outside of individual applications that serves as a clearinghouse for authentication.
A method used today is purchasing a certificate of identity for webservers. This is what provides your web browser the security to show a "Lock" symbol when you have an encrypted, authenticated connection to your bank, or other secure website. More information on identity certificates is available in this Wikipedia article on Public Key Certificates.
Using a method like this would allow users who wanted or needed to prove their identity a means to do so, as they interact with online applications and services.
If the requirements to prove your identity to receive the certification were on par with obtaining a driver's license or passport, that should restrict fraudulent impersonations to a reasonable degree.
There is probably little usefulness for the majority of users to be authenticated to this degree, since they interact with friends and others who can identify them offline. But commercial, official and public-service (like news organizations, or non-profits, etc.) accounts would have a method to prove their identity and tie a public message to their account.
With authenticated messengers handled, let's look at securing the integrity of their messages.
Integrity
Cryptocurrencies (discussed by Matt & Destin here) have an excellent technology available toward authenticating the integrity of messages - blockchain registries.
Blockchain is a registration of transactions that is designed to be trustworthy. It uses mathematically complex hashing to ensure that the original transaction hasn't been interfered with. For cryptocurrencies that means a ledger of purchases and sales that's verifiable. If we use the same technique for postings to social media, or email, or to applications, we can ensure the message sent is the message received. If you want to verify something said by someone, it would be straightforward to check the message's integrity by checking the blockchain.
Used in a social media platform, like Facebook, a quoted message attributed to Mikey Mouse could be flagged by the software if the message has been changed. It would indicate trustworthiness of posts. In Destin's recent video on Why Your Newsfeed SUCKS - SED 212, he and Katie Byron examined a photo that purported to show two newspaper writers watching the resignation of Richard Nixon. Was it a legitimate photo of that event? They couldn't verify it during their time together. If the original poster had used a blockchain registered account with an app that supported blockchaining of posts, it would have been straightforward to verify who posted the photo. That could have helped verify the accuracy of the photo.
Conclusion
It is smarter to use technology to create trusted sources, rather than attempt to verify the accuracy of everything said by anyone. Using registered and trusted accounts, authenticated messengers can act with fidelity in their online actions. Viewers and other users can trust the messages from trusted accounts because the integrity of the message is verifiable, leading back to the trusted messenger. It will not solve all of the problems with the internet, but knowing who said something and what they really said is a big step towards bringing trust to our online conversations.
1History, like, all of it.
2 https://www.poynter.org/shop/fact-checking/handson-factchecking/; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUiYglgGbos; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfoWars
No comments:
Post a Comment