Charles Talking About Buying A News Media Outlet

I was delighted to hear that Charles is considering the purchase of CoinDesk.

No more fake news
Reputation for anonymous authors.
No more fudbots or trolls

Just imagine: Every reporter to sign articles with their private key using their Cardano wallet to prevent fake news. Anonymous reporters could also sign with their Cardano private key and still maintain anonymity while earning reputation.

Anyone can now fabricate videos featuring world leaders saying things they never actually said. False news and disinformation appear on Facebook and Twitter all the time which are circulated by foreign governments and our own governments to cause confusion, to shatter the common will of our nations, and to insert puppet leaders into office. When a nation’s people no longer know what is real they can be manipulated to do anything. We are at serious risk of losing what remains of our democracies as more and more people are fooled into handing over their free will to the banks and corporations that control the news and social media.

There is a defense against fake news and false narratives - Digitally Signed Documents. These are videos and written news articles which have been encrypted using the private key of a trusted source such as a news caster, political leader or respected public figure. An app decrypts these files using the news source’s public key. If the documents are legible after decryption then the reader can be certain that the document is indeed from the trusted source and that it has not been changed.

If Charles buys a media outlet then soon anyone will be able to safely create a journalistic body of work and prove that they authored the entire work and that it has not been tampered with all while allowing the author to remain anonymous if he/she/it so chooses.

Artificial Intelligences will also be able to post. There will be no way to know they are not human. But it will still need reputation in order to have it’s work seen. So it will have to earn a reputation for quality work just like us humans. As it is now, chatbots flood our social media with fud and disinformation without any restriction and most humans don’t know they are consuming disinformation from bots.

Imagine what we will have when this is combined with an anonymous blockchain like Midnight that can’t be censored?

Real news curated by the public.
A news outlet where the public can find real news
Thank you Charles

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Digitally signed documents is nothing new and been around since decades. Any news outlet can already provide proof that article came through them by verifying through twitter etc. Not sure how this is important since their keys could also get hijacked, similar to website hacks.

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And the “Would be cool if they have to put collateral on the table and if the story turns out to be false they lose it.” idea is just totally bonkers.

Contrary to the belief of technocrats and meritocrats like Charles, “truth” is very, very rarely objectively measurable.

It’s sad how much mayhem they tend to cause believing they are “objectively right” and everyone else is either dumb or evil.

Also, who is going to check the veracity of claims ? Would it by verification of information through democracy ? Or would it be through a centralized entity?

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Just saying that being able to sign documents with a Cardano wallet provides added value and synergy for the Cardano community. Also, instantly knowing the source of the original news means more efficient and accurate evaluation of the news. The result is a better informed public that makes better decisions.

Been a lot of confusion with fake accounts on twitter recently and they have also been caught censoring tweets that conflict with the current government narratives. Then there is always retribution against those with dissenting opinion. This is why we need anonymous decentralized news which is curated by the public via smart contract using reputation and history of the contributors.

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The public via reputation attached to the digital signature of the news article and by all the comments which also will be signed digitally via Cardano wallet and so have attached reputation and history. Authors and commenters will have reputation and history even if they choose to be anonymous.

Metrics and AI built into the smart contract will help the public make sense of all the data generated by reputation, history and content.

Please read your own post. Listen to the tone of it as you read. Seems to me the first line accuses Charles of being dumb or evil and then in the last line of your post you admonish people for believing that others are dumb or evil for having an opinion.

Still, the inconsistency and mean spirit of your post creates opportunity for understanding why it is important to aggregate history and reputation of commenters as well as authors. If a commenter has a history of bashing Charles at every possible opportunity then the public reading the comment should know and perhaps take this into consideration.

While I do not agree with your mean spirited characterization of Charles, I do agree that truth is very, very rarely objectively measurable. Never the less, each person is must try to discover what is true in order to make good decision concerning their own lives. For this reason I support the idea of a news media outlet for the Cardano community that tracks and aggregates reputation, history, and content of it’s authors and commenters even if the authors and commenters prefer to be anonymous. This where digital signatures of articles and comments could help. Posting content on a decentralized blockchain where the content is curated by the public via smart contract is also key eliminating fake news, disinformation, inflammatory content. I am sure that Charles understands all of this and is working to put all of this in place.

No:

This idea is not useful at all in my opinion. He is smart, although probably not as smart as half the Cardano community and seemingly also he himself believe. And he is not evil. He probably believes that his ideas are only the best for the world. We all do that regarding our ideas. And can still fundamentally disagree.

Oh, believe me, I only take every tenth opportunity, when worshipping him goes on my nerves too much.

…, but isn’t this exactly an example that we don’t need anything more than we already have?

You have my previous comments to judge me. I have your previous comments to judge you. You are free to try to smear me for my previous comments. I am free to try to smear you for your previous comments.

And nearly everybody would take an anonymous comment without any history with much more reservations. And they can still exist in cryptography-/blockchain-secured journalism and comments. Every new anonymous/pseudonymous identity starts as one without history.

As @icycranberry already pointed out: Digital signatures are an old technology. We could already do that without blockchain. Seems to be not a huge need for up to now.

It could maybe help against impersonations or account takeovers, but does it help against the most common examples of them? You could still do an impersonating account with a new certificate and would have almost the same situation as today: The original account calls out the impostor.

People or also news outlets deleting and modifying old content to safe face, to look better already gets called out even without the ability to cryptographically prove to them what they did. Provability is rarely if ever the central issue there.

The social media that we already have is a form of curation by the public. And it very much boosts fake news from CoViD denial via climate change denial to “Great Reset” conspiracy narratives. What makes you think a blockchain-based system would behave fundamentally differently?

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The truth can difficult verify in our viral digital age. In addition to authenticating a journalist’s authorship it would be useful to crowdsource validation of their reporting, similar to prediction market forecasting but after the fact. The Internet Court of Lies is a platform, in beta, for adjudicating the veracity of online stories by a jury randomly selected from a subscriber pool. Once a story is “in the wild” the ICoL can provide “wisdom of the crowd” context, a kind of structured social curation. Public demonstration trials are held every Wednesday. Sign up to attend at www.liecourt.com.

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