Credweb Update (AMITT, Scores, ClaimReview)

*Last week, *we talked about AM!TT, an approach to extending currently 
deployed infrastructure for coordinating efforts to resist information 
security attacks to also help with misinformation attacks. Most of us 
aren't experts in that technology, so we didn't get into the details 
during the hour, but it was a good start. Folks are encouraged to 
followup with the presenter (Sara-Jayne Terp), or the misinfosec group. 
Lots of notes, details, links, and slides in the meeting record. 
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jbUzm7jBcZBl5FLfVFH5bi-3x4_e1eOBBBmH-ON9Rp0/edit>

*Today, *(the 50th anniversary of the internet) we talked about 
"credibility scores", numbers people sometimes assign to content or 
content providers to indicate their "credibility" (or something vaguely 
like credibility, depending on the system). I can't do justice to all 
the points of view presented (please read the meeting record 
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Va2TmDAH70ugm0h7l-Z14IztSbHe2v7PpZ34BMhTXio/edit#heading=h.we34ou8fmejy> 
for that), but I'll highlight a few that struck me:

  * There's a difference between scoring the process and scoring the
    content produced. For a restaurant, there's a kind of process review
    done by the health department, which gives one score, which is
    different from the reviews of how the food actually tastes.
  * There's another distinction between scoring done by professionals
    and experts (eg Michelin restaurant reviews) vs crowd sourcing (eg
    Yelp). They are each vulnerable to different kinds of manipulation.
  * Some folks are quite skeptical that any kind of scoring could ever
    be net helpful. Others see great potential in systematizing scoring,
    aiming for something like "Mean Time Between Failure" numbers used
    in engineering some systems (eg airplanes) to be extremely reliable.
  * There is clearly a danger here, as the scoring systems would be a
    major target for attack, and their vulnerabilities could make the
    overall media system even more vulnerable to misinformation attacks.
    Even if they are highly secure, they might not be trusted anyway.

Aviv agreed to start drafting a document to focus discussion going forward.

*Next Week*, we'll have a presentation and discussion on ClaimReview. 
This is the technology which enables fact checkers to get search engines 
(at least Google and Bing) to recognize fact checks and handle them 
specially. It is a clear success story of how standard data interchange 
can help against misinformation, but much remains to be done. I expect 
we'll hear more about plans and ideas for the future.

As usual, people are welcome to join the group, or just joint for a 
meeting of special interest to them.

      -- Sandro