@
Evan Prodromou recently asked
how admins and moderators would handle disinformation in the upcoming U.S. election. This was my answer.
The biggest problem is that the people who are lying will use their resources to tell people that the truth is a lie. So you can't always count on the consensus or specific parties or interest groups or authorities to be accurate. In fact, there have been many cases where new facts and evidence came out months or years later that completely changed what was proven to be "true."
So instead of telling people what the truth is, I would do two things:
1. Encourage discussion of the issues (and prohibit fighting). A good honest discussion usually chips away at blatantly dishonest propaganda because one side will have evidence and the other side won't. Or, more typically, the other party simply has not thought their position through and it is easy to poke holes in it.
2. I would like to develop an addon (plugin / module) that detects certain keywords and allows moderators to add a "context notice" when certain posts are displayed. This "context notice" would not tell people what to believe, but would direct people to a website that includes links to all different points of view (like ground news), plus a list of independent fact checker articles on the topic. People can see the different points of view and decide for themselves. This would be displayed in the user inbox and next to publicly displayed posts on the website or app, and not distributed over ActivityPub.
I've found that prolonged exposure to evidence and different interpretations of that evidence (i.e. different points of view) will eventually convert even a "true believer" into someone who is more aligned with the truth. It doesn't happen overnight, but getting people out of their information bubble helps give people a more accurate view of the world.
