Anti-fake-news system in Global Hash Village
As was described in note about Liquid Democracy in Global Hash Village the biggest weakness of the system (and general threat to any democracy) is its susceptibility to fake news, anti-scientific theories and ideologically driven unmeritorious debates. Therefore to solve this problems we need a system to easily rank the media streams (and their publishers) and allow every human on earth to discern science from fake.
The first element of the system is a Distributed Ledger (DLT like blockchain, tangle or hashgraph) that will contain all the scientific papers. Scientific communities already have the means to rank their processes (journals, conferences, scientists themselves and their papers). They already provide ranking systems and can evaluate themselves and their work so it is very hard (but not impossible) to publish fake papers (or when you do - you decrease your general ranking). They easily distinguish the top specialists (and top journals) from aspiring wannabes (and low level conferences). The idea is to provide rankings in different fields of science that will reflect how respectful you are. Ranking that will increase with good publications (and dissertations) and that will punish you for making grave mistakes or false claims. Such system not only provides everyone with access to scientific papers but can also allow to link the papers to prior works and in case of some theories falsification would allow to automatically inform the authors of the new discoveries that might influence their work and their own findings. If the authors fail to update their work in some given time their papers could be ranked lower thus their own rank would diminish.
The next level is similar system for the media streams. All literature and media streams (youtube channels, popular science programs in public televisions etc, web page of political party) would be ranked and their rank would go higher with new publications (that would be valued high by specialists) or lower when there will be significant omissions (missing facts and also missing sources), errors or deliberate misinterpretations (compared to the current state of the scientific knowledge or wrongly performed statistics).
The ranks should be made obligatory by law to be shown on or with the content for larger media streams and even some incentives (for example lowered tax or prizes and awards) could be made for higher ranks promoting science works and pro scientific attitude.
The specialists who would be the validators of papers and media would be mostly the scientists already owning titles in their fields but also all other people. Common citizen could have for example rank 1 while bachelors, masters and PhDs would have for example ranks of respectively +10, +20 and +50 (in their specific fields, and 1 in other fields as everyone). Publishing papers and input in debates (evaluating content, correcting errors) would improve their rank (the increase should probably be regressive - limiting the maximum available rank). The mistakes they do in their papers or erroneous claims about others work (both papers and media) would lower their rank. The rank would easily allow to sort comments by the specialists and laymen and could even prevent lower ranks to debate on high-level forums (e.g. uninformed citizens cannot discuss the climate change issues with top professionals on some scientific channel, climate related, programme screening with rank of 30, even if the movie is made suitable for age 10+)
In this way the scientific rank would allow to easily distinguish the science from fake. It would enable possibility to implement filters on social media, pages, TV programmes that would filter out the “news” with low or no ranks. It will also allow to distinguish specialists' positions from layman opinions.
As with many other subsystems in Global Hash Village this calls for the worldwide IDentification Ledger for all citizens which will be discussed in other notes.