It's been 5 years since I started researching online misinformation and building practical solutions. Here are things I learned about one of the most complex and fundamental problems of humanity: Making sense of the world around us. [1/13]
Misinformation is not just about false information, but information overload. The more information people need to process daily, the higher the chances are that misinformation can affect them. Reducing this overload is as important as providing correct information. [2/13]
Business was always about trading scarcity. For current ad-based online services it's our attention. So what's next? Scarcity of quality information. Whoever manages to build a scalable business model that rewards quality information will crack the misinformation problem. [3/13]
Objective truth is a construct at the intersection of many subjectives truths. Of course there are facts like the law of gravity, but also those need to be accepted by many people to be considered a law. Even the most correct fact is considered wrong if no-one believes it. [4/13]
Battling misinformation isn't about providing facts as much as it is about who those facts are from. People believe information if they trust the messenger. Approaches that claim to be correct will fail to reach the right people without the ability to address their biases. [5/13]
The economics of misinformation rely on centralisation of social networks. It's a no-brainer that if you want to influence many people at low cost, its an advantage if there is just one algorithm serving millions of users, or if your troll-comment can reach 10.000 people. [6/13]
Any solution that aims to tackle misinformation must give more control to the individual user to adapt their experience, like how algorithms filter quality information, feeds are generated or who's information they are exposed to. [7/13]
They also need to give people control to pick their own source of truth, even if those are not 100% correct. To escape filter bubbles, it is critical that they can compare different sources so they can experience cognitive dissonance and understand nuances of subjects. [8/13]
This is especially important because now all information is a singular perspective, like an article a feed or a post. Getting multiple perspectives on a piece of information takes considerate amount of effort and that is already a big problem that shouldn't be replicated. [9/13]
I predict the next big thing in social media is following contextual knowledge streams of people (e.g. what they search , content they found, notes). Not ephemeral/monolithic like Twitter, but permanently searchable, filterable, comparable, for collaborative sense-making. [10/13]
Since every person structures knowledge differently, closed tools built for millions of users aren't enough to organise and share such nuanced information. We need open systems where users can adapt tools to their workflows. Like email but for knowledge management. [11/13]
Which leads us to the root of the misinfo crisis: Investor reward models. Open systems are inherently antithetical to the way investors are rewarded, which win when the company manages to create lock-ins, and captures attention & market share. [12/13] #surveillancecapitalism
As long as investors are rewarded with uncapped stock value or profit sharing, solutions will optimise for centralisation, lock-ins & captured attention, not content quality & free flow of information needed for collab. sense making.[fin]
