
The following is an excerpt from Chapter 6: Prioritizing Trustworthiness in the book Holy War for True Democracy.
We need to have a clear focus both on whose trustworthiness we need to measure and in what domain we focus.
It is impractical to attempt to measure the trustworthiness of every person and organization in the world; therefore, we narrow the spotlight onto people and organizations (Internet IDs) that are information providers on government and politics. We start with Internet IDs with the largest following or greatest influence. It is fine if the choices of whom to evaluate first are imperfect because as the service grows, the breadth and depth of coverage will grow until most important Internet IDs have trustworthiness reviews submitted by people who are both highly competent at trustworthiness reviews (there will be training programs and judgments on the trustworthiness judges) and highly trustworthy (each judge will have his own trustworthiness score).
It is imprecise and impractical to attempt to measure the trustworthiness of an individual across all aspects of their lives. A given person will have a professional life, a community life, a social life, a family life and a spiritual life. Perhaps the person is extremely honest with his friends and family, but when talking politics, he spreads falsehoods. For our purposes, we only care about:
- Communications about government and politics
- Communications that are posted on the Internet (with a permanent URL) and are verifiably authentic, preferably posted by the person or organization itself
Among the things that will be evaluated:
- Articles posted on the Web, including opinion pieces and blogs
- Books
- Audio and video posted on the Web
- Publicly available social media posts, including tweets