People Who Do Not Exist Invade Facebook
The worst thing about widespread fake information is the ease with which you can convince yourself that everything you don&#x27;t like is fake. We don&#x27;t really have a defense against it that allows for people with opposing perspectives to coexist.<p>I wonder if it&#x27;s possible to somehow create a &quot;consistency checker&quot; that can check to see what claims are compatible with what other claims. Not a truth checker; that&#x27;s far too dangerous and easily abused. But a system that just checks for consistency, combined with a &quot;web of trust&quot; where you can see the connections to people with different perspectives who you know are NOT liars&#x2F;can connect to events you KNOW are true. That might help people trust information from outside of their comfort zone and identify problems with their own outlook.<p>There&#x27;s precedent for that kind of a thing in the math world. MetaMath is an example of a system that verifies proofs based on substitution rules alone, plus whatever axioms you add to the system. Natural language news stories that need to correspond to reality are obviously a much different beast, and maybe it&#x27;s impossible to do something equivalent with knowledge that isn&#x27;t as rigid&#x2F;formal as math, but it&#x27;s tempting to try.<p>Could easily backfire and make the problem worse if done improperly, though. The risk is that such a system could be taken over&#x2F;hijacked my ideologically motivated individuals to reinforce their own ideas and hide inconsistencies rather than shine a light on them.