Two new projects have come to our attention, both aimed at fighting disinformation and defanging fake news. One is a concerted new effort by Mother Jones to treat disinformation as a beat (whatever happened to CNN’s fake news reporter?). The other is a fancy-sounding new website from the cryptocurrency world that is going to use blockchains and bitcoins to harness collective knowledge to act as an informational disinfectant.
MotherJones is raising funds for a new special project to devote sustained attention to the weaponization of disinformation, responding to multiple calls for new journalistic endeavors to offset the negative effects of fake news. By creating a new “disinformation” beat focused on how vested interests pollute the media, putting a reporter on it and giving them backup from data scientist and fact-checking team, the outlet can hopefully produce a steady stream of real news about fake news. The day-in-day-out churn will, in our humble opinion, provide a great service to everyone who cares about seperating fake news from journalism.
On the other hand, WUWT recently ran a pair of posts announcing a new effort, not in any apparent or direct way related to WUWT or climate denial, “designed to destroy fake alarmist news.” Whereas the Mother Jones approach is housed squarely in journalistic tradition, this new website, called Trive, is part of the shiny new blockchain bandwagon. The author of the WUWT posts, Mike Lorrey, is an advisor to Trive and a former WUWT contributor and moderator--raising huge questions about the sites’credibility.
Although the project doesn’t have any of the obvious signs of bias in its launch materials or press releases, it’s not a great sign that its founder David Mondrus’s Twitter feed appears to embrace right-wing deepstate paranoia, fear of communism, Trump-Russia propaganda, victimization, Seth Rich conspiracies from 4chan, and UFOs. Though he mainly tweets about bitcoin stuff, Mondrus has dipped a toe into climate denial: he once retweeted Steve Goddard, a climate denier so consistently fake he’s not even welcome at WUWT, and also retweeted a story about the Tom Karl pausebuster non-scandal that was literally deemed fake news.
Oh and Mondrus retweeted a Holocaust denier and a stories from Gateway Pundit, one of the fakest of “news” sites. He also tweeted a Pro-Trump TownHall op-ed about the death of journalism. TownHall was formerly run by the Heritage Foundation, now operated by Salem Communications, the group that was recently revealed to have instructed its already-conservative commentators to more enthusiastically embrace Trump.
But back to Mondrus’s quest for journalistic integrity. The premise of Trive.News, as we understand it, is that when a user submits a story to the site, he or she can put a special Trive-specific bitcoin bounty on fact-checking it. Then a different user will research the story, create a fact sheet about the claims made, and collect the bounty. Then still other users sign up to act as a jury to decide if the research confirms or disproves the original story, and rate the piece as verified or not. For users who download and install the browser plug-in, a “fake” story’s text will be faded. Per Trive’s thinking, this collective wisdom will make consistently fake sites see less traffic and stop reaping the rewards of fake news.
But if the userbase reflects the founder’s bias for conservative fake news, then Trive will become another conservative attempt to accuse any media critical of the right of being fake, turning misinformation into fact for Trive readers.
Which is exactly why the Trive promo posts are on WUWT, per Trive advisor Mike Lorrey: “One reason I’m publishing these stories on WUWT is to get the word out to the skeptical public so that YOU can be part of the solution.” That seems to be working, as a Trive user has already put up a Science story about ticks and climate change that uses WUWT as a rebuttal.
But Trive’s bosses are apparently confident that a) enough people will join the site, b) the setup will actually work, with a proper balance of story submitters, researchers, and judges, c) the special Trive coin (only usable on the Trive site) will actually have real world value to motivate people to do the work of researching and verifying claims and d) deniers will outnumber sane people and “alarmist fake news” will be thoroughly debunked and destroyed.
At risk of stating the obvious, while MoJo’s approach keeps with media norms and practices that prevent fact checks from themselves becoming fake news, Trive’s complex bitcoin-blockchain-factcheck-crowdvote system sounds a bit… conTrived.
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