Idea - Fact checking social media

Hi busy tech people.
I have an idea for a tool that can potentially make a significant dent in social media disinformation.

While there are a good number of fact checking apps / browser extensions, I am interested in tackling social media falsehoods. Platforms already automatically screen for music copyright violations - why not use the same approach for egregiously false content? With some kind of debunked-conspiracy database, a script could arguably detect and curb the next Pizzagate, no?

Now I figure it’s no cakewalk to get major tech platforms to license a script, so perhaps the best starting point would be developing a fact checking app.

I don’t have the skillset to develop this so I’d like to work with this community in creating it. Please respond or message if interested!

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Interesting idea. There are media organizations here in asia accredited by facebook as social media fact checkers. Their recommendations for example a fakenews will lead to downgrade that post and it goes down in facebook newsfeed and cannot easily be seen.

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That is another good idea - more human moderation. An essential part of social media security.

I find it useful to think of social media as super-sized message boards. Anyone in a niche online community in the last couple decades knows that an unmoderated forum can turn south, quick. Hands-on human moderation of social media is woefully low for the amount of content, no wonder they struggle with abuse. How can the “social media security” industry be jump started? The need for it is abundantly clear.

If you mean tackling the whole ‘fake news’ issue, that will be a very hard nut to crack, and even more so because much of the content to scour lives inside the walled garden of the providers.

But the idea nonetheless is good. We have a number of related ideas that were brought up in this forum since the start. Maybe we should collect all of them and decide on a project that can start small(ish) and then grow. Something like a naming & shaming website, that also particularly highlights the good guys that are out there… the gems of humane technology :slight_smile: