Does the Web Need a Ministry of Truth?
In Tim Berners-Lee’s speech announcing the new World Wide Web Foundation, the author of the web’s foundation suggests that we need some sort of truth rating system to combat the proliferation on misinformation on the web.
While it may look like a good idea on first glance, it also bears some resemblance to the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, a centralized body that arbitrarily decides what is true and what isn’t.
Berners-Lee doesn’t suggest that the web needs a Ministry of Truth, but instead says that he’d like to see a distributed approach where “different organizations label websites in different ways.”
Think of it as the Ministries of Trust.
Again, it might sound good at first, but when you sit back and think about how to implement such a plan, things get very messy very fast — who will oversee such a system? And if no one oversees it, how is it better than simple pagerank? How would you stop it from becoming the popularity contest that pagerank is?
If all this strikes you as vaguely familiar, it’s because Berners-Lee’s proposal isn’t new. In April 2007, web pundit Tim O’Reilly proposed something similar in response to some of childish ugliness in blogosphere. Luckily, two days later he recanted and admitted to Wired that his blogger’s code of conduct — complete with a sheriff’s badge graphic adherents could display on their sites — was “a bit misguided
I’m not going to argue that there isn’t a lot of misinformation on the web, nor will I back those who claim that people can do their own critical thinking when reading on the web — the recent United Airlines bankruptcy debacle pretty much destroys the “people can make their own judgments” argument.
However, attempting to rate sites based on the likelihood that their content is true is doomed to failure.
Even if it did, by some miracle of technology, actually get built, what happens when one of the “trusted” sites gets something wrong? After all, Google News is generally pretty reliable, but it clearly got the United Airlines story wrong.
Knowing who to believe and what is true is hardly a new problem and certainly not one unique to the internet. Information is messy, complex, opinionated and often true and false inside a single phrase. It’s something we’ve managed to live with for thousands of years and something I suspect we can continue to cope with for thousands more.
While I’m a big of fan of technology and its problem-solving potential, in this case I firmly believe there is no solution. Either you accept the fascism inherent in a Ministry, or Ministries, of Truth, or you accept the confusing mess of raw information, sorting through it on your own.
The World Wide Web Foundation generally strikes us as a good idea and we look forward to seeing what it produces — hopefully not a Ministry of Truth.
[via Slashdot, photo from Wikipedia]
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