(2017-05-11) Caulfield The Annotation Layer As Factchecking And Context Marketplace A Proposal

Mike Caulfield: The Annotation Layer as Fact-Checking and Context Marketplace: A Proposal. A lot of our thinking about giving articles a “fact-checking” context has been about automated, centralized, closed approaches.

This leads to a real problem for a couple reasons:

once there’s lock-in

without ability to select from multiple context providers the centralization will eliminate broad swaths of valuable perspective. Worse — we won’t notice those perspectives have become invisible. (monoculture)

This community feels alive, and vibrant, and energized.

yet I can feel the pressure here — who is going to get funded?

Annotation As a Marketplace for Context

I’d suggest we do what we often do when we want to move more quickly: separate the data layer from the interface layer. And I’d suggest that the best way for everyone to work together is to use the newly W3C-approved annotation layer as that data layer.

One method — the method many people seem to want to use — is to make an extension (Browser Extension) that looks at pages and highlights these organizations and links to the research. But of course I’ve already got half a dozen extensions.

Because annotation is just a data layer, you can add as many of these as you want, stored with reference to the URL and anchored to specific text on the page.

This allows anyone that has a piece of the solution to spin up an annotation bot with a few lines of Python code and push their information out to the reader endpoints.

A front-end extension could pull information from 20 or 30 separate annotation providers in giving context to a page.

if you have an analysis that you want to share, you most likely have identified a set of pages already, and that set is likely relatively small.

The second but more serious question is about the transparency... being able to look at your page ratings over 100 signals from different providers will make it easy to game the system.

But ultimately, while we need to protect the researchers who produce these tools we also need to give people more transparency into why their pages are suddenly not drawing traffic.