Your post advocates a

(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting misinformation. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work.

( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else’s career or business

( ) Assumes that you can use textual metrics to determine if a claim is true or not

( ) Assumes that pictures can’t be faked

(X) Assumes that popularity equals truth

( ) Assumes that you can tell whether something’s true by where the web server hosting it is located

( ) Any social network that tries to adopt it won’t get used

( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once

( ) Requires fake news to opt into additional scrutiny

( ) Requires mind reading

( ) Puts additional strain on already underfunded and understaffed organizations

( ) Big Tech won’t put up with it

( ) ISPs won’t put up with it

( ) By the time you took it down, the damage would already be done

(X) Good luck finding a neutral third party on major political controversies

( ) Would just move the problem from Facebook to Signal

( ) “Trust No One” is not a solution

( ) The surveillance state already has more data than they know what to do with

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Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Readers failing to notice “this is a joke” disclaimers

( ) The existence of Schelling points other than the truth

( ) Black Hat SEO tactics

( ) “Residential IP” proxies

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it

( ) Legitimate disagreement

(X) Context

( ) Bias

( ) Asshats

( ) Dog-whistle politics

( ) Jurisdictional problems

( ) Linguistic drift

( ) Asymmetry of information

( ) Asymmetry of available resources

( ) The time it takes to verify a claim being far longer than the time it takes to write it

( ) New information coming out after a story has been published

( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches

( ) Extreme profitability of fake news

(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who literally believe in magic

( ) Technical illiteracy

( ) Hacking

( ) Astroturfing

(X) People with valuable information, but no capital

( ) Laziness

( ) Dishonesty on the part of fake news pushers

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and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) It would violate Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

( ) Technically, that’s how it already works

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical

( ) Fake news was already a problem before Facebook; we called it “chain mail”

( ) Outlawing The Onion would be stupid

( ) Post ranking algorithms should not be the subject of legislation

( ) Any countermeasure that involves outlawing end-to-end encrypted private communication is unacceptable

( ) Any countermeasure that involves spear phishing is not going to work more than a couple of times

( ) We should be able to talk about the letter Q without being censored

( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually

( ) Who gave you the right to decide whether something is true?

( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem

( ) Anonymity does not destroy all class and power differences, and makes bad-faith participation more common

( ) The distinction between “political” and “apolitical” is not always clear-cut

( ) The distinction between “private” and “public” is not always clear-cut

( ) The distinction between “fact” and “opinion” is not always clear-cut

( ) People who can’t afford lawyers would be de facto excluded from the internet

( ) People who can’t afford bodyguards would be de facto excluded from the internet

( ) Your scheme would have made it illegal to share a video of police brutality without consulting the very institutions that benefit most from police brutality

( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

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Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(X) Sorry, but I don't think it would work.

( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.

( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

(X) Next time try understanding reading my comment.

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Right back at you.