Amplifying trusted voices
Online reputation will become increasingly important, even critical. In today’s world, Twitter’s ‘verified’ status should represent whether the person is known to post verified information or not, not whether the person is a known celebrity.
But since that is not the case, and Twitter as of this writing has shown little evidence of such a system, we will need to build this database on our own, first for ourselves, and then share it with our communities.
One idea on Twitter is to create Twitter Lists of people who you trust. We could each create lists, interest or topic wise, for ourselves and make the available as public lists with friends so they too can follow them.
You could extend this to whole websites with shared OPML lists, i.e. lists of RSS feeds of website that you know and trust. Unlike Twitter lists, though, you’d still have to import this OPML file periodically into your RSS reader.
Shutting out misinformation
While we work to amplify the voices of individuals and publications we trust, we must also work to block out those bad actors. One way is with shared block lists, just like publicly available ad-block lists for the web.
Ad-blocking lists are an important part of the web, and they are often run by volunteers – see this article from 2019 on the maintainers of EasyList. The fantastic pi-hole, which is an ad-blocking software you can install that references such lists, is also maintained by a small community, which this BusinessWeek article profiled.
If ad-blocking lists and software were the counter to oppressive and intrusive ads, we need their equivalent for the misinformation and abuse on social media.
What would those look like?
(Part 3 – Misinformation on Twitter, other social media. And an idea)