It’s Time For a Media Revolution: The GitHub Model of Truth

If the old systems have failed to allocate authority effectively, what new tools can we come up with to sift true misinformation from information the monarchy doesn't like? The solution isn't to give up and say we can't be trusted with unfettered access to information. It's to figure out how to help people make better sense of all that information ... See more

If you want a better truth architecture, you need a better trust architecture. I mean, when you think about it, I mean, we know firsthand so little of what we think we know and most of it comes from... It's why fixing the relational problems to me is as or more important as fixing the content problems. Because ultimately, if we don't change who peo... See more

In response, this crisis has been a boon for citizen journalism. Twitter, Medium, Substack, and Facebook have played an instrumental role. No one’s making a career change; rather truth-seekers of all backgrounds are synthesizing facts and sharing their findings.

As we have seen again and again throughout history, in a completely free information fight, truth tends to lose. To tilt the balance in favor of truth, networks must develop and maintain strong self-correcting mechanisms that reward truth telling. These self-correcting mechanisms are costly, but if you want to get the truth, you must invest in them

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When truth is decentralized, no one voice can change anything until the community first confirms it’s true.

We now live in a digital age, in which information becomes fluid and variable. All that was solid has melted into air. In the print world, getting your facts right was about competence and care; now what the facts are depends on what date you access a website, or which website you visit. The nature of information has changed irreversibly.

Simultaneously, we are facing a technological revolution the consequences of which we are only beginning dimly to grasp, let alone understand. The evidence seems to be growing that this revolution – which is more accurately a revolution in how information is generated, collected, processed, analyzed, shared, consumed, and understood – may be fundam... See more

When facts are few, persuading the ignorant is relatively easy. But information abundance, already characteristic of early modern societies, engenders a degree of skepticism: The more there is to know, the more likely we feel that truth is elusive. Information super-abundance, or the condition of “digital plenitude,” as media scholar Jay David Bolt... See more