Find Verified Journalists on Mastodon
presscheck.org
presscheck.org
I know that there's a kind of verification mechanism already in Mastodon where you put a backlink in your website and then you get a badge. But it is an order of magnitude more complicated than "this server vouches for the identity of this account," and website ownership isn't really identity anyway.
Was always surprised there was no independent website/source for this (Hey, my name is X, my details are at example.com/1234 if you want to find how to contact me).
The miserable excuse for "press" which the corporate media is is important only in the sense that they are one of the main drivers behind the polarisation in society. Most of the big corporate press outlets - cable, broadcast and their internet arms - are not much more than thinly veiled propaganda outlets for the Democrats or Republicans - pity the poor soul who gets his view on the state of the world from one of these merchants of outrage.
Blue-check "journalists" who work for these outlets tend to produce narrative instead of news, aiming to stoke the fervour of their intended targets. Instead of a blue check it would be good to mark them with a red flag, 'warning: exposure has been shown to lead to distorted views of reality'.
Here's the dev's profile - https://keyoxide.org/9f0048ac0b23301e1f77e994909f6bd6f80f485...
I was hoping https://keys.pub was going to win out but the dev has moved on to other projects.
That presumes their tweets are important. That's what twitter wants them to feel, the purpose of checkmarks on twitter is to make them feel important. If a journalist has something actually important to say, let them publish it and let their publisher confirm their identity. The byline on a New York Times article can be trusted, it doesn't need some dumb little check symbol next to the name.
The tweets of somebody with articles in the New York Times are not important. When a journalist tweets, they bypass the mechanisms and customs which would normally make what a journalist says important, namely their editors. The apparent importance that tweeting has is an illusory sensation cynically engineered by twitter, to the detriment of society.
Some people put too much weight on it, and I partly blame Twitter for making it a status game (e.g. using verified status to influence ranking algorithms) and for kneecapping the security feature by allowing display name changes without further verification.
That this then led to scarcity and a weird status stratification is unfortunate. But literally no one at Twitter or elsewhere ever tried to say these checkmarks denoted "expertise", so I don't know where you got that.
It's true that some people would want to be "verified" and couldn't be because they didn't meet whatever internal notability guidelines Twitter implemented. And it's likewise true that traditional news organizations had a shortcut to get anyone with a byline verified. And maybe that's unfair.
But it has absolutely nothing to do with "expert". Verification was verification of identity. They told you that in the text that popped up when you clicked on the checkmark!
Has any of these "journalists" have ever done any journalism, like investigating political officials, exposing corruption scandals, even if at a local level, you don't need a global story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Certificate_Manageme...
Who is eligible?
Any journalist globally, including freelancers, newsletter writers... any category, really. This site is about confirming someone is who they say they are, not defining what a "journalist" is.
How are profiles verified?
Applications are to be made here. The quickest way to get verified is by tweeting a link to your Mastodon profile on an already-verified Twitter account. Failing that, providing a company email address for us to follow up with is another great method. Freelancers and newsletter writers should include as much background information and linked worked as possible in their application.Well, the linked mastodon profile (https://mastodon.world/LaurenWolfe) doesn't even exist.
(If you want to protect your bubble.)
The twitter check was never a mark of credibility. Most of Fox News had twitter checks.
I mean, you are right, it never was a mark of credibility. But no one really claimed it ever was, so it's confusing that you are using it as an accusation.
And it's useful to put it on journalists for the same reason. The fact that you personally dislike these people doesn't speak to the need for those of us who don't to know who we're reading.
Social media isn't a newspaper, it's a skinner box. We'd all be better off if they all walked away from their tweeting addictions for real, instead of moving to a synthetic analogue to replace their clout addiction. Mastodon is methadone.
No, stop it. That kind of hyperbole isn't helping the discussion. It's very clear what the intent was behind verification. It's clear from the name itself; Twitter was quite clear about it at the time. And as pointed out, it's abundantly clear that it was serving exactly that need well, as the second it was modified people started getting fooled into selling the wrong drug stock!
I'm sorry you're upset at Twitter, but it doesn't help things by lying about their products.
Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka, Louis Farrakhan and Milo Yiannopolous are examples of people who lost their checkmarks not because Twitter started to doubt they were themselves, but because they were so loathed.
The moment Assange lost access to his Twitter account though, and his friends (who had access to it, for just such an event) wanted to use it to call attention to his plight and campaign for its release, it was quickly suspended on the excuse that it wasn't him personally.
The use of checkmark revocation as a punishment proves that the intent of checkmarks was to reward people with a sensation of being special, not to verify their identity.
> lying
You think I'm wrong, therefore I'm lying? Lying is about intent. I think you're wrong but I don't think you're lying. I just think you're foolish.
There is also zero reason to limit the term "journalist" to big institutions.
The "presscheck.org" verification asks freelance journalists looking for mastadon checkmark to submit links to their published work. Having your work published is what actually matters.
> big institution
The bylines of articles in a small-town newspapers can be trusted. They don't need checks next to their names when their articles are published by small newspapers. The checks are only "important" on social media, because social media is trash engineered to make people feel special.
Look at the big stories of the last 6-10 years. How many did Chuck Todd or NPR get totally wrong?
And this is the important part: They got a lot wrong by simply not asking obvious questions, let alone any that would require the skepticism or curiosity that used to be requisite to the profession.
Even then you might need to "open in browser" copy their link and paste it in to follow.
Done all that? Great the app won't pull their recent toots. So that was useless wasn't it?