Media Party 2017

Could we build dispute mechanisms into the fabric of the web? Meedan is leading an initiative called the Credibility Indicators Working Group which is a consortium of media, platform, and standards bodies representatives. How did we get here? Meedan began as a crowdsourced translation project. Way back in 2003, we thought that the most promising angle for promoting peace was going to be the web. We imagined social networks collaborating to share translated media and interfaces that would enable cross-lingual media browsing and interaction. Having a team in Cairo, we found ourselves curating and translating a lot of real-time media during the revolutions. Pretty quickly we arrived as two strong conclusions: 1. with the rise of mobiles UGC was only going to become more central to the way we view and understand our world; and 2. the same 'annotation' layer that we were using to generate translations on top of this content could also serve to provide needed verification and context for a medium (UGC) so well suited to creating and distributing unattributed misinformation. This last year has been quite a remarkable time to be working in media verification. The rise of misinformation has confirmed of our long-held belief that the web - esp the social web - needs better methods for attaching and transporting context to newsworthy UGC. But for open web advocates this year has also caused us deeply question our web optimism - we did not imagine the web could or would arrive at such a place where the most open of our social platforms - Twitter - is used more effectively by demagogues than by the journalists who have historically called this network their home turf. This talk will present some ideas related to the framing of our effort to structurally address misinformation without burning down the open web.