And to join up the dots between the last post and a couple of others recently.
What social media misses is any concept of authority.
Ooooh anathema – free expression and science fact denies authority surely?
Well no. We do of course use the concept of friendship – in terms of who shares what with circles of known sources – to confer some level of trust and filter out noise in the tweets and posts we receive. But its very non-specific trust, unless we spend a great deal of effort organising our circles and lists.
What we need is some authoritative tags that perform a kinda “Snopes” function in near real time. Not just fact / fiction / but partisan / interest warning flags. Tags that can scale priority of visibility, without directly limiting freedom to express. Tags that automatically get copied with any Reply or Retweet or M-retweet.
[QUORA? – BTW I recently subscribed to (and unsubscribed from) Quora – a Q&A based social-media micro-blog – where in principle anyone can ask a question (and use it to make a rhetorical point, naturally), but only authorised responders assigned by subject matter are allowed to correspond. I heard and met Jay Wacker at a recent science event – liked the Quora concept. Sadly for the topics I was interested in, the questions were too basic / trivial or the responders too obviously following limited agendas. But nice try. Might subscribe again if I have time to interact more, but in current form not working for me.]