How Credder’s News Review Platform Can “Fix-The-Internet”
When we discuss ambitious goals such as Mozilla’s initiative to “Fix-The-Internet”, we must first ask ourselves if the internet is really broken? And if it is, what can we do to fix it?
When I think of what the internet is for most people, I think of information. Most of what we interact with online, no matter the medium, is some form of information. When you message a friend, they’re receiving information. When you read a news article, you’re receiving information. When you watch a movie on Netflix, it’s entertainment, but it’s also information.
If you can accept that the internet is a means by which we share and distribute information, then the next logical question to ask is where does all that information come from? Well, an enormous amount of the information we read, view, and share come from news media. Why news media? Well, they’re paid to focus on finding new information and bringing it to light. Not all of us have the time to dedicate ourselves to discovering and then publishing previously unknown information, but journalists are on the payroll to do exactly that. So if we can accept that the internet is information and that most new information comes from news media, now we can ask ourselves if news media is broken or not.
For example, if we had a news media that was financially incentivized to capture our attention for the benefit of advertisers, rather than inform us, that would seem like a pretty broken system at the core of the internet. So is that what we have with today’s news media?
Unfortunately, yes it is. Online journalism is forced to sustain itself with the internet’s main source of revenue- advertising. When journalists and publishers work on behalf of advertisers, they are more likely to write clickbait and sensational stories to drive visitors to get in front of their advertisers, because advertisers pay based on the number of views/clicks/impressions, etc. This means that the incentives of news consumers and news producers are not aligned and that until they are, the internet will be full of poor quality information meant to satisfy advertisers.
Woah, that sounds pretty broken. What can we do about it?
How about fact-checkers?
Yes, fact-checking can help but it doesn’t disincentivize the author or outlet from publishing the clickbait in the first place. And we all know that clickbait will travel far and wide before a fact-check even gets its shoes on. Even when the fact-check does eventually surface, the publisher has moved on to writing their next piece of clickbait because there are no real consequences.
Ok, what about artificial intelligence that tells us what is true or not?
This sounds good in theory, but how will we train an AI to do this if we have no way of doing it ourselves and therefore nothing to teach? An AI can only know what we train it to know, and we still don’t have a way of instantly identifying what is true or not.
Can’t we just let Facebook and Google pull down content before anyone sees it?
Well, we just established that there’s no clear way to determine what is true or not, so asking Facebook and Google to censor content just means we’re giving them the ability to decide what we see in a way we already know will be imperfect. Plus, censoring content creates its own list of problems, so this solution is one we would likely come to regret.
So how can we realign the interests of news consumers and news producers? How can we make sure there are consequences for publishing clickbait and other poor quality information? How can we solve the problem in a way that keeps up with the pace of new information being published every day? And how can we do it all without censorship?
Credder is participating in Mozilla’s “Fix-The-Internet” initiative because we believe we’ve found a way to fix the broken incentive structure at the core of our information system. Credder is a news review platform that allows verified journalists and the public to review the news they read. This creates a Critic and Public score for every article, author, and outlet. These reputation scores help news consumers avoid time-wasting clickbait and quickly find the most trusted news and sources on any topic. By empowering the world’s news consumers to connect and work together, we are creating credibility scores that can change over time, highlight quality journalism, create negative consequences for publishers who are working on behalf of advertisers, and do it all in a way that doesn’t require censorship. At Credder, we believe we are fixing the internet’s broken core, and we hope you’ll join us in our mission to move the news industry from clicks to credibility.
Written by Chase Palmieri, CEO and Cofounder of Credder
