Meronymity

Greetings CCG,

 From my reading of a recent techxplore story, the 'meronymity' devised by "MIT researchers" (and apparently the Allen Institute) may be an innovation of interest to many in this group. It attempts to solve the problem that anonymity, desired for good reasons often, precludes knowing the credentials of the participants, and hence brings trust and accuracy problems.

https://techxplore.com/news/2024-04-equitable-discussions-social-media-meronymity.html

 From the story:

"Meronymity (from the Greek words for "partial" and "name") allows people in a public discussion space to selectively reveal only relevant, verified aspects of their identity."

The story goes on to describe an implementation with academics, and the results. It does seem to have had a noticeable positive impact. They go on to say:

"Now that they have built a framework around academia, the researchers want to apply meronymity to other online communities and general social media conversations, especially those around issues where there is a lot of conflict, like politics."

It appears that some form of verifiable credentials is used, but whether these are W3C-compliant ones, and involved DIDs, I'm not sure. I did a quick scan through the pre-print paper the story is based on (available through the above link, at the end), and couldn't see any direct reference to them.

If not, IMO this might be a good place for W3C VCs and DIDs to be involved. Hence this post. :-)

Steven Rowat