Re: Fact-checking and community notes on the Fediverse

Social Web Incubator Community Group,

In addition to those previously shared theoretical uses of P2P networks to enable and enhance searching for digitally-signed annotations for purposes including both fact-checking and argumentation [1], I am pleased to share a different related idea that modular plugins-based software architectures could allow decentralized social-media platforms’ administrators to empower their end-users to be able to make use of one or more third-party resources to fact-check their own and one another’s content, e.g., using encyclopedic resources such as Wikipedia [2][3].

One way that this could be achieved involves that end-users' selected and configured fact-checking services (e.g., [3]) could receive, process, digitally-sign, and return ActivityPub objects which would quote [4] or wrap the original input objects (e.g., selected sentences of text).

As envisioned, objects quoting or wrapping other objects could stylistically resemble blockquotes which additionally provide end-users with visual indicators or tooltips, e.g., “this content was verified by CitationNeeded to be accurate using Wikipedia on January 19, 2025”. Similarly, these technologies could be utilized by end-users to share that content was verified and visually indicated as being false or inaccurate by a third-party fact-checking service.

There are many exciting possibilities and approaches to consider. Thank you.


Best regards,
Adam Sobieski

[1] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swicg/2025Jan/0008.html
[2] https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/thread/2IUQ3AVSW3CC3NYYQY3RWG74S36I4RXT/
[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Future_Audiences/Experiment:Citation_Needed
[4] https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/disambiguating-various-interpretations-of-a-quote-feature-pre-fep/3426/10