Fake news mitigation architecture – Who is allowed to comment or send you information
Dec 7th, 2016 by Jesper Kråkhede
One of the core concepts of this architecture is the management of who is allowed to comment and who is not. Normally you put that in the hands of an administrator or allow anyone to comment but that opens up for trolls and bullies. What we need is the possibility for the single individual to decide if anonymous or identified persons should be allowed to comment. This will be implemented with a component that before allowing the website or social media system checks if the users wanting to comment is authenticated. If so, comments will be allowed. The writer will have the power to allow or disallow anonymous comments.
The simple scenario here is a child being abused by cyber bullies. By not allowing comments from unauthenticated users no comments will be allowed. This could be extended to disallowing comments on posts where the person has been tagged.
The other scenario that is applicable to this is of course fake news. One way to disallow fake news in your media flow is to only allow news that are from a legitimate source. This could be traced back to the source. If that is written by an anonymous user then it should not be possible to make it legitimate by reporting it under a authenticated account.