Again the author doesn’t consider crypto solutions like pgp, keybase or any kind of signed social trust graph. Why do people keep writing this sky-is-falling thesis over and over without at least arguing for or against cryptography?
You think suddenly everyone is going to start signing their tweets and blog posts and people will en-masse assign a trust score to said content based on the people they know and trust in their PGP keychains?
I'd like that world quite a bit but it's decidedly not going to happen - probably at all and definitely not at scale. Are you so sure that's what we'll all do in response to automated content that you're calling this article a "sky-is-falling thesis"? If so then I'm genuinely baffled by your confidence here. Where does it come from?
We did migrate from http to https for example. And we do use a (top down) cryptographic scheme for DNS. We also do use similar schemes for crypto currency. So we do use technology as needed when needed. I’d argue the time is coming when we need to use it in some way to secure human conversation on the net. If I am confident here it is because I see this as typical of the same transitions that forced us to use crypto elsewhere.
True PGP is a failure but I can see room for a scheme where people bother to indicate that a person is real. Nobody is going to bother indicating that a post is real or not (nobody cares).
Does it have low value for to you to know that I myself am say 3 friend hops away from you and have say a “likelihood of being human score” of 7/10?
And it wouldn’t help you to be able to know that say many random sms messages you get or random phone calls you get or random posts or articles you have trust score of say 0/10 because nobody in your extended network of trust can attest they exist?
True fake content is hard to solve. At an intimate scale nothing can solve deception. If you’re my friend and you decide to manipulate or deceive me then there’s not much I can do. I extended trust to you and you violated it. This isn’t a new phenomena.
But the article isn’t specifically about fake content. It is also about sock puppets. It’s about an extended field of spam. Crypto can play a role at lest asserting that a post is uttered by a friend of a friend or somebody who has greater than zero trust.