RE: Why has CredWeb been silent when it is now needed more than ever?

Hi all – working my way through this, and I may have missed some branches of the discussion here.

 

I completely agree with the idea that rules/systems/standards about process, provenance, supply chain, identity transparency, information construction and distribution are highly interesting and tenable. By the same token, prescriptions around the argumentation, factuality, truthfulness, fallacy, fact vs opinion labeling, argument fairness are, to me, generally uninteresting and untenable except for certain corner cases.  (In that sense, from a superficial reading, Twitter seems to have the wrong end of the stick in their approach).  I also really like processing latency rules, like the ‘Good friction’ ideas that I heard Aviv say something about some months ago, and I saw Subbu tweet something about this more recently. I think these can be really impactful, and not that hard to define and implement.  

 

My ideas on these sorts of process rules (to be contrasted with content substance rules) are in this paper <https://docs.google.com/document/d/11wXSa5EMSgsJXlPK5Q_ykBQbdH9imDHJLg3G2yaHK-g/edit#heading=h.kfmgr5unlgpz>  I wrote more than a year ago to motivate conversations in the CA state legislature (slowly ongoing).   I haven’t read some of the other references linked to in the thread, and I’ll try and do that. 

 

I’m happy to jump into further discussion to explore alignment on doing something concrete and impactful.  Thanks for restarting this.  

 

Chandran Sankaran 
650 740 8755 

 

(Full disclosure, I am also building a for-profit benefit corporation  Repustar <https://repustar.com/Repustar>  that is attempting to open up, standardize and democratize notions of fact-checking.)

 

 

From: Tom Jones <thomasclinganjones@gmail.com> 
Sent: Saturday, January 23, 2021 3:09 PM
To: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>
Cc: markchipman@gmail.com; Credible Web CG <public-credibility@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Why has CredWeb been silent when it is now needed more than ever?

 

Wikipedia has some good rules, we could start there

thx ..Tom (mobile)

 

On Sat, Jan 23, 2021, 3:03 PM Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org <mailto:sandro@w3.org> > wrote:

I agree chain of custody / provenance is a great tool.  My sense is CAI is approaching that well, although I haven't seen anything since their presentation to us nearly a year ago (see Feb 26 meeting records). May be worth (1) checking in on their status, and (2) seeing if there are use case not addressed by their focus on images & video.

     -- Sandro

On 1/23/21 5:24 PM, Mark Chipman wrote:

Hello All: 

 

Interesting discussion.  Lot's of good points made.   

 

After reflecting on an extraordinarily dishonest world in so many respects over this general topic, during the last several years, one of the top things that comes to mind in this subject is the old phrase "truth is in the eyes of the beholder".  

 

Technology probably will never resolve the primary problem that biases will mostly trump facts for most people (pun wasn't intended there).  Depending on one's own circles of influence (those where individuals own truths are going to be sought) is how information is going to be determined or deemed as "credible"; heavily drawn upon from one's own resources.  Thus true or pure facts will vary from source to source and remain fluid based on situations, wealth, social environments, age, regional and national politics in play, religious views, one's own emotional state, etc.

 

Might I make the suggestion that the focus of CredibleWeb not be establishing truthiness of sources by means of weeding out disinformation (besides, who decides this)... but rather to focus on information's chain of custody, where the primary focus is now on tracking sources... similar to a timeline, but not based solely on time, but rather on who establishes what will be considered factual and when each of this happens.  

 

This angle resides in the need to know where does information come from; to establish one's own levels of believability of inclusive facts whose relevance is based on who or what entities are involved along the way with the chain of custody of said information.  I generally find myself believing some sources way more than others, within the global information cesspool, a place where someone's always going to take the opposite side of an issue.

 

Thoughts?

 

-Mark Chipman

 

On Fri, Jan 22, 2021 at 11:55 AM Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org <mailto:sandro@w3.org> > wrote:

This topic is quite relevant and current for the SocialCG,  as Sebastian said.

I suggest people interested in cross-platform social media moderation attend their meeting tomorrow <https://www.w3.org/wiki/SocialCG#Next_meeting> .  Members of CredWeb are welcome to attend, I'm told. It's using a platform called BBB which you may want to get familiar with before the meeting.

Related, folks might want to check out eunomia <https://eunomia.social> , which includes modifying mastodon for better handling of misinformation. Sebastian and I were at a talk they gave a couple days ago.

      - Sandro




On 1/22/21 12:54 PM, Christopher Guess wrote:

Hello everyone, it’s been awhile since I last commented on this channel, but now that the tone is turning down a bit on the fact checking side I wanted to say a few words and share a thought or two in response to the ideas on this thread.

First, around moderation: The first thing to remember, as we’ve been reminded here, is that the W3C is a global organization, so any talk of what is acceptable to moderate should be looked at in a global context. This of course presents difficulties due to the fact that morality and cultural standards vary wildly between different countries, regions, and communities.

It’s been mentioned that a user-based voting and self-regulation protocol system could be a remedy here, but what’s being proposed, to my ears, actually sounds exactly like the system that Parler had implemented. In their system any flagged post would have five random accounts assigned to vote on if it was appropriate. This, as we’ve seen, did not work out in the long run for them. It would instead lead to the most active users (those most radical in my experience) being the lone voices of “reason” in the forums. Even Reddit, which at least has a somewhat heavier, but still distributed hand, eventually had to step in and shut down the most vile subreddits due to the moderators condoning the actions of the users.

Second: When it comes to protocols over platforms, I have to ask, if I was working at a social media organization: how does adopting a protocol in any way limit my liability? Agreeing on standards to share information does nothing to prevent someone in a country where Section 230 doesn’t exist from suing me for allowing the information on my system in the first place. Though I am not a lawyer, I imagine saying, “Well, someone else said it was ok,” is almost certainly not going to hold up in UK or German court. Given a lack of liability shielding I can’t imagine any for-profit (non-Fediverse) social network giving up their information via a global protocol unless they get something out of it.

OK, so, what do we do about this? The honest answer from my perspective is: I find more problems with a standards-based approach than solutions. In the end we are at best preaching to the choir, and at worst screaming into the void. Those people that use platforms that would follow such standards are the least likely to actually need the moderation in the first place. I can’t imagine StormFront or the successor to Parler or Gab caring even a little about a white paper and what Twitter does. If anything, it gives them more followers. The real way forward, as I see it, is beyond the scope of this chain, but involves sociologists, economists and a severe change to 1st amendment interpretation in the United States.

Instead, because this group does care, perhaps we scope this down and bit of a smaller piece of the pie? While the W3C scope is global, perhaps this group can focus locally. Instead of claiming to be a panacea for all moderation issues, focus on just getting the Mastodon system on board. The system already shares data by default, and gives the runners of each instance full moderation control. Essentially, by putting in a sharable moderation system we’re piggybacking on what has already been built and standardizing that while expanding on it. It may not be the perfect system, but it’s a starting point at least and 1.) Already has buy-in by programmers and 2.) is something actively in use at scale already and 3.) is open source, so the whole process can happen in the open without the smoke and mirrors of dealing with the large tech companies.

We make it a point to not even mention we want to be an example to the large social media orgs, or part of a wider solution, but that instead, we’re partnering with groups that we share values with to do just a bit of good in the world. If it works, perhaps we can move forward from there, but even getting some solution into the Mastodon protocol and standards written for that single use case would be a huge leap forward.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you all stay safe, sane, and have a wonderful weekend.

-Chris

 

-Christopher Guess

cguess@gmail.com <mailto:cguess@gmail.com> 

US/WhatsApp/Signal: +1 262.893.1037

PGP: AAE7 5171 0D81 B45B – https://keybase.io/cguess

On Jan 22, 2021, 10:51 AM -0500, Tom Jones  <mailto:thomasclinganjones@gmail.com> <thomasclinganjones@gmail.com>, wrote:



Question - I assumed that this group was responsible for CredMan - is that correct or does that live somewhere else? 




Be the change you want to see in the world ..tom

 

 

On Fri, Jan 22, 2021 at 7:26 AM Dan Brickley <danbri@google.com <mailto:danbri@google.com> > wrote:

On Fri, 22 Jan 2021 at 14:54, Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org <mailto:sandro@w3.org> > wrote:

On 1/21/21 8:53 PM, Bob Wyman wrote:



 

I could go on at length, but first I'd like to ask if you think that this kind of protocol-based solution, as an alternative and complement to platform-based systems or standards, is something that could or should be explored in this group. Is this the right context in which to explore and develop such protocol-based approaches?

I think that's more or less the group's mission.

The problem is, we don't have people participating in the group who are building such systems. It's generally a mistake to try to create a standard without participation from people developing viable products which will use the standard. I've helped people make that mistake several times in the past and it's not good.  It's somewhat related to the architecture astronaut problem. <https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architecture-astronauts-scare-you/> 

I am, myself, building such a system. Unfortunately, I don't currently know anyone else who is. I also don't know if it can become a viable product.  Until there are several other people who are independently building this stuff, I don't see a way for standards-type work to proceed.

 

 

That sounds about right.

 

I still believe a big part of the difficulty here is also that online credibility is kind of an arms race, so those seeking to be recognized as credible will be paying close attention to any putative standard or protocol, which makes developing such things collaboratively in an open way problematic.

 

The CG has at times been an interesting forum for discussion, though, and some good has come out of that. Maybe there's value to re-starting meetings like that.

 

Even just as a meeting place for folks who want to find like-minded collaborators, a community group has value...

 

All the best,

 

Dan

 

Most recently, I was imagining us having presentations by folks developing credibility products, and maybe coming up with a review process. In particular, I was thinking about how we could push every project on the "why should people trust you?" question.  A proper architecture (like CAI) can answer this question in a way that closed apps can't. Crunchbase has 500+ companies with the keyword "credibility", 9000+ with the keyword "trust", and 59 with the keyword "misinformation". [I haven't gone through the 59. Clearly some like snopes and blackbird are about combating misinfo; others, like Natalist, are just making reference to how there is misinformation in their target market.]

Is there a story that would get, say, 20 of those 59 to be interested in interoperating? I've only talked to a few of them, and I wasn't able to think of a serious argument for how their business would benefit from going open-data. It might be worth trying some more.

 


        -- Sandro



 




 

-- 

- Mark