One problem has cropped up fairly regularly in the blawgosphere, and as a blawg is visited by a more diverse audience, it has presented a real dilemma. The problem is distinguishing truth from fiction. A blawger makes his bones over time, where readers find the blawger credible or not. A blawger found not credible is a very lonely blawger. Hopefully.
But comments on blawgs often toss in statistics, allegations, “facts” that are unsourced. It’s a perfect way to mold an argument around at outright lie, or to smear a person with a deliberate falsehood. Unlike blawgers, commenters don’t have established credibility. Often, they are anonymous, precluding any attempt to determine whether they are just snipers, dropping in to post a lie and then disappearing in the forest.
Adjunct Lawprof, 1st Amendment Lawyer and occasional potty-mouth Marc John Randazzo is trying to come up with a solution at The Legal Satyricon. He’s grabbed a post by Jon Garfunkel at Civilities suggesting that a non-profit website be created to serve as the Notary of the internet.
For a small fee (Garfunkel’s idea), a person could “swear” to the truth of their statement and the internet Notary would administer an oath, thus making the statement subject to perjury.
The oath is accepted as a test for sworn truth because there are penalties for lying: the crime of perjury. It’s not so clear that frank truth has a similar correcting mechanism.
Marc like this idea.
What a great idea. I can see a few classes of people who wouldn’t support it: The whiny PC types, they want censorship of anything that could possibly make anyone “feel bad.” Unethical lawyers wouldn’t like it either – it would diminish their ability to suck legal fees from whipping their clients into a frenzy. The extremely wealthy and powerful wouldn’t like it either — since it would essentially destroy the ability to file a SLAPP suit.
I can appreciate why Marc, like many of us in the blawgosphere, would want to find a mechanism to test the veracity of statements. We frequently get people making claims that are far too burdensome to verify, or defy verification because they reflect personal allegations of fact. We’ve nailed a few shills here in the past, posting a vast array of claims and statistics that at first appeared very impressive, until we figured out that the posters were paid by to troll the blawgosphere and derail criticism against their benefactor.
But I doubt the Notary idea has legs. I doubt people would be willing to pay the fee, even if it’s just a dime, when they can drop by, post, and flee and leave their “unsworn” testimony floating their for free. And even if they would, who would investigate and prosecute anyone for perjury? Even when the allegations had a sufficient impact on someone that they would pursue it vigorously, who would have jurisdiction?
It’s good that people are thinking about ways to clean up the lies, loose talk, scam statistics and general ignorance that permeates the blawgosphere, and I bet the someone will eventually happen upon a way to deal with these problems. But I don’t think the Notary idea is the one.
Still, I applaud those who are trying, and wish I could offer an idea that would work. At the moment, I’m coming up empty, but I’ll keep thinking about it. Maybe one of the smarter, more imaginative people around here (Gregory? Young Steve?) has some thoughts. Come up with a brainstorm and you will likely be immortalized throughout the world wide web. That would be pretty cool.
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Scott,
I agree that this “notary model” would be unlikely to succeed as an alternative to simply drive-by responses. Let me critique your critiques:
I doubt people would be willing to pay the fee, even if it’s just a dime, when they can drop by, post, and flee and leave their “unsworn” testimony floating their for free.
I agree with this one. However, the notary model seems to be an alternative to litigation — not an alternative to simply posting or googlebombing.
And even if they would, who would investigate and prosecute anyone for perjury?
Yeah, you’re right. I have to concede that this is a good critique. I’ve taken two-day depositions in which perjury on day one is confirmed on day two. Did anyone care? No. I’ve seen members of the bar submit sworn affidavits to judges who would have to be mentally impaired to not see the perjury — no action. So who would care in this circumstance? Nobody.
But… there must be *something* that could be done.
Even when the allegations had a sufficient impact on someone that they would pursue it vigorously, who would have jurisdiction?
That’s a good one too. I suppose we’d simply default to the Zippo test, no?
(Potty mouth? I don’t agree with that, Scott! I think that there is no such thing as a “bad word.” Words have power because we give power to them. I refuse to give any word talismanic power — but I take no offense 🙂 … )
A better idea is a chain-of-credibility server, which keeps track of who finds whom credible. For example, if I find you credible and you find Other Steve credible and Other Steve finds Joe Schmoe credible and we have told the server that, then when Joe Schmoe posts a comment somewhere I can query the server to learn that Joe is three links away from me in the chain of credibility. I know AHCL’s secret identity and find her credible; people who find me credible can query the server and learn that AHCL is two links away from them in the chain.
That’s a very interesting idea, vouching for others with degrees of separation. Of course, it could prove problematic when we find out that someone we feel is credible turns out to be a lying skel, but on the other hand, that’s always a risk with anyone you know.
Thanks for taking notice.
I concede that this is a *much* larger problem to tackle! Between me and Google, one of us has trademarked “TrustRank”– and, hint, it’s the one who stands to gain much more by implementing it.
This is still a thought experiment for now… (but, keep in mind, the party of the second part in the prior paragraph has a way of turning thought experiments into Internet services in the blink of an eye.) The idea wasn’t about creating perjury traps. If we want to fulfill John perry Barlow’s libertarian vision of cyberspace as a self-governing system, the system needs a way of demanding “sworn truth” much more than the “frank truth” which is enabled by sites like AutoAdmin and WikiLeaks.
I applaud your efforts and your idea, not because they were necessarily a perfect plan but because you identified a need and tried to provide a rational way to fill it. We need to keep trying in this self-governance experiment, and one day someone will come up with the answer.