Zuckerberg Removes Fact Checkers, Just In Time For the Bots and AI Flood. How Do We Stop Them? It's Simple, Actually.

Trust in our systems matter.

For the record, we are against “fact checkers” that are centralized and therefore easily corruptible. It was obvious and apparent during the pandemic that the “fact checkers” were working for the people who were corrupting our systems, pushing agendas, products, and causing harm to millions of people.

But, we are for decentralized versions of fact checking. Community Notes on X is one example of decentralized peer-to-peer fact checking. But Community Notes isn’t good enough (the code is not open sourced, for starters). Another example of peer-to-peer fact checking would be Wikipedia back when it was actually decentralized, and the people themselves could edit and fix it without centralized oversight. Despite the corrupted power players trying to show that Wikipedia was not accurate at the time, there were plenty of studies showing that it was one of the most accurate sources of information available. Sure people would post funny inaccurate updates, but those would be swiftly edited, and then the user posting the bad information would have their credibility reduced. The truly decentralized Wikipedia didn’t last long as the people corrupting our other systems found a way to centralize and corrupt Wikipedia too.

The main point is, decentralized fact checking is not the same as centralized. In fact this is true with all kinds of systems. We showed this graphic before in our article titled Decentralize Everything!! but it is good to revisit it. You could picture centralized fact checkers to the left side and “Community Notes” to the right side of this graphic (if Community Notes were actually harder to corrupt).

In the digital world, it is not just as simple as centralized vs decentralized anymore. There is a new problem arising with decentralized fact checking online, and that is the rise (and predicted future exponential increase) of ai and bots in our social media systems. In other words, how do we know if the decentralized fact checkers are actually people? If they are not people, then the entire premise of decentralized fact checking is invalid. Corporations or governments could have huge swarms of fake people that basically act as a centralized unit.

To make it worse, the people in power will almost certainly try to sell us the solution to the incoming wave of ai and bots as Digital ID. We all know that their endgame includes digital control. That starts with digital ID, Central Bank Digital Currencies, and Social Credit Scores like what China has. If you look at the graphic above again, these are all things that would belong under the centralized (and thus bad) left side.

We can solve this problem of bots and ai on social media platforms without allowing digital prisons to be built around us. The answer? Peer-to-peer “vouches” that we give to each other confirming that we are real people. Let’s say I give you a “real person” voucher for someone I met in real life, and leave a little review. By mixing IRL and URL (In Real Life and digital life) we can create higher trust systems that keep bots and AI out. For example you could scan a QR code off someone’s phone if you met them in person and vice versa. Then, if you have a web of trust with 1000 real people that you have met, and an ai or bot comes and tries to enter that realm and has no connection to anyone you ever met, you should not trust them. We could have ways of “flagging” them as suspicious too. This would be nearly an impossible system for ai and bots to penetrate since they don’t exist in the real world (IRL).

This decentralized peer-to-peer way of giving each other “trust” scores or vouches is not a new phenomenon. In fact we use it all the time on eBay, Amazon, Etsy, etc as a way to know if we should trust sellers and buyers.

Trust matters.

In fact, the best way to cause mass confusion (and then tyranny) is to create distrust in all of our systems. From government and media, down to social media and even language. When our systems are pushed to be purposely distrustful, it creates confusion, fighting, and then we stop trusting each other and cannot create strong communities. In other words, bad and corrupted systems destroy communities. To solve this, we must build new systems- high-trust decentralized and transparent systems - that we migrate to like we wrote about HERE.

As a thought experiment, we laid out a possible high trust digital world using peer-to-peer “Trust Tokens” (on blockchain) that we give each other for acts of trust in the real world. A system like this would easily keep ai and bots out of it. We laid it out with detailed graphics in this article FIXING TRUST ONLINE if you care to dive deeper.

As the saying goes, the most important things to quantify are often the most difficult to. Knowing if the avatars in our social media platforms are real or fake is vital for the future of our systems and communities. We cannot be fooled into accepting digital ID as the solution, when we can solve it on our own by using peer-to-peer vouching systems.

The way to fix everything is by fixing trust in our systems.

Thanks for reading!

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All problems that do not defy the laws of physics are solvable.
Solving problems is happiness.
And humans solve problems better in high-trust groups.
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