In the battle against the relentless wave of online misinformation, MIT researchers have thrown a new weapon into the ring. Instead of relying on heavyweight tech companies to moderate the web, they've developed a browser extension, named Trustnet, empowering the common Joe to take a swing at the falsehoods flooding their screens.
With big tech's content policing often under fire, this tool aims to return the power to the people, letting them tag fishy content and trust assessments from their chosen circle. But while it sounds good on paper, critics worry that users might just snuggle deeper into their echo chambers, safely tucked in by their own bias. Farnaz Jahanbakhsh, the brain behind the project and now a postdoc at Stanford University, insists on a different route. "A decentralized approach is more scalable, so more content could be assessed," she told MIT News.
The extension works on any website and allows users to assess content by tagging it as accurate or not. They can then follow others whose judgments they trust to see their verdicts on various websites. Inspiring a sort of grassroots approach to content verification, the Trustnet browser extension seems to nudge citizens towards critical thinking about the barrage of information they consume daily.
Wrapped up in a two-week study, 32 individuals got their hands dirty evaluating content ranging from celebrity gossip to home improvement tips. This potpourri of topics suggests that people value assessments from those who aren't necessarily professional fact-checkers. "This shows that what users need and the kinds of content they consider important to assess doesn’t exactly align with what is being delivered to them," Jahanbakhsh argued while her findings were detailed with MIT Professor David Karger in a paper at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, according to MIT News.
While the tool arms users with the power to separate wheat from chaff, the threat of creating insular communities where only harmonious viewpoints pass the gate looms overhead. MIT's team recognizes this, mulling over the idea of suggesting certain trusted assessors, like the FDA, to users.
The mission to clamp down on misinformation is not new, but the MIT duo's approach takes a different tack. It suggests a future where fact-checking isn't holed up with the gatekeepers but is instead a community garden tended by the vigilant everyday user. According to MIT Professor Karger, "The only way to protect ourselves from this flood will be to rely on information that has been verified by trustworthy sources. Trustnet presents a vision of how that future could look," as stated by MIT News.
