Your post advocates accusing media companies of being in league with the devil, a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (x) vigilante
approach to fighting fake news. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work.
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else’s career or business
( ) Assumes that you can use textual metrics to determine if a claim is true or not
( ) Assumes that pictures can’t be faked
( ) Assumes that popularity equals truth
( ) Assumes that you can tell whether something’s true by where the web server hosting it is located
( ) Any social network that tries to adopt it won’t get used
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Requires fake news to opt into additional scrutiny
( ) Requires mind reading
( ) Puts additional strain on already underfunded and understaffed organizations
( ) Big Tech won’t put up with it
( ) ISPs won’t put up with it
( ) By the time you took it down, the damage would already be done
( ) Good luck finding a neutral third party on major political controversies
( ) Would just move the problem from Facebook to Signal
( ) “Trust No One” is not a solution
( ) The surveillance state already has more data than they know what to do with
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Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Readers failing to notice “this is a joke” disclaimers
( ) The existence of Schelling points other than the truth
( ) Black Hat SEO tactics
( ) “Residential IP” proxies
(x) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Legitimate disagreement
( ) Context
( ) Bias
( ) Asshats
( ) Dog-whistle politics
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Linguistic drift
( ) Asymmetry of information
( ) Asymmetry of available resources
( ) The time it takes to verify a claim being far longer than the time it takes to write it
( ) New information coming out after a story has been published
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of fake news
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who literally believe in magic
( ) Technical illiteracy
( ) Hacking
( ) Astroturfing
( ) People with valuable information, but no capital
( ) Laziness
( ) Dishonesty on the part of fake news pushers
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and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) It would violate Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
( ) Technically, that’s how it already works
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Fake news was already a problem before Facebook; we called it “chain mail”
( ) Outlawing The Onion would be stupid
( ) Post ranking algorithms should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Any countermeasure that involves outlawing end-to-end encrypted private communication is unacceptable
( ) Any countermeasure that involves spear phishing is not going to work more than a couple of times
( ) We should be able to talk about the letter Q without being censored
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Who gave you the right to decide whether something is true?
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Anonymity does not destroy all class and power differences, and makes bad-faith participation more common
( ) The distinction between “political” and “apolitical” is not always clear-cut
( ) The distinction between “private” and “public” is not always clear-cut
( ) The distinction between “fact” and “opinion” is not always clear-cut
( ) People who can’t afford lawyers would be de facto excluded from the internet
( ) People who can’t afford bodyguards would be de facto excluded from the internet
( ) Your scheme would have made it illegal to share a video of police brutality without consulting the very institutions that benefit most from police brutality
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
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Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!