
The following is an excerpt from Chapter 6: Prioritizing Trustworthiness in the book Holy War for True Democracy.
I propose a global, crowd-sourced trustworthiness Internet service that collects trustworthiness reviews on people and organizations who provide information on government and politics. The Internet service would:
- Collect trustworthiness reviews and rating scores from the public and store them in the cloud with full transparency on every aspect of its operations
- Compute two numeric values for each Internet ID (person or organization): an average trustworthiness rating and a confidence value on that rating
- Generate a small icon that conveys at a glance the trustworthiness of a particular individual or organization
- Work with the media and news aggregators to show the trustworthiness icon next to the byline of news articles so that readers can see at a glance the trustworthiness of the author (person or organization)
- Promote the service so that its use is widespread, and thereby pressure government, politicians, the media and pundits to be more honest in their communications
In the early stages, before the movement and its umbrella organization have achieved critical mass, the organization will provide browser extensions, such as a Google Chrome extension, so early adopters can start using the icon before the big aggregators and media companies display the icon by default.
The following sections provide detail.