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

What we need is social media made entirely for the purpose of revealing the truth. As the French investor Xavier Faure said: “We need a trust social network. Where we don’t signal what we like, but what we vouch for.”

The other problem with media comes from the new subscription business model they implemented. With an increasing polarization, media outlets must stay in their political leaning. If they don’t, they face a massive loss of subscriptions. An example of this happened recently with the NYT. By publishing “Send in the Troops,” the company faced one of i... See more

It’s the GitHub model of truth. You know there will be mistakes, and you’re okay with it. As soon as you discover a problem, you correct it, and everyone can submit corrections.

Matt McManus, coined the term “age of bullshit” to express the knowledge crisis we are going through. It’s a dangerous time we live in, and in order to solve many of the challenges we face, we need, first, to focus on the meta-problems.

The problem with this is that social media value engagement, and this doesn’t align generally with the truth. The number of retweets and likes has nothing to do with what’s true.

When’s the last time you heard a politician admitting he or she was wrong? I can’t think of an example. Conversely, if an app crashes, its developers will have no choice but to admit they made a mistake.

Truth should follow the Github model. As soon as something is factually wrong, it should be easy to correct it and make the mistake visible to everyone.