Disclaimer: This is not a job application, I am perfectly happy with my job at ServiceNow.
Back before the 2020 election, I had an idea for a post that as of yet, hasn’t come to fruition titled, “Apparently, I’m President”. Who knows if that post will ever come to see the light of day, as of right now it is entirely in my head (and as you can tell by the fact it’s been over a year since I last posted it may never see the light of day, life’s been busy). I won’t get into a ton of detail but the main premise of the post but there were several items I would pursue if I all of a sudden found myself as the president of the United States.
Honestly, most of the ideas that would make up that post if it ever comes to be would be quite a stretch to see become a reality. There’s one idea, however, with the recent Twitter takeover by Elon Musk could actually happen. Whether you agree with his tactics or not, he is definitely making things happen on/at Twitter.
The idea came to me when I was listening to Brené Brown’s podcast. I’m not going to get the quote exactly right, however, the gist of what she said was that the average person no longer had the ability to tell the difference between fact and opinion which in my opinion is largely due to social media and the advent of the 24-hour news cycle (there’s another blog post in there titled “The Day the Music Died” for those keeping score in the back).
Some of the ideas I had were to use advances in technology and apply them to the way our government works because we’re finally getting to a tipping point when it comes to technology and the speed at which technology can be delivered to the average person. My idea is this: there should be a way for a user to watch a live broadcast with real-time fact-checking taking place. An example of how this would work is shown below.
There are two sections to this image:
- Main viewing pane [left-hand side]: this pane would allow the user to view a live TV stream (they’d have to log into their service provider to view the live broadcast)
- Twitter Fact-Checking Bot [right-hand side]: this pane would provide a real-time transcript overlaid with indicators of whether the statement being made is factually accurate or not.
In order to make something like this happen we would need to have a repository of transcripts of public statements made by public figures, items that were spoken publicly or posted online publicly, and cross-referenced with the public figure. This repository would also need to account for statements that were made where the public figure later publicly apologized (and not a typical “I’m sorry how my statement affected person X” but a true apology where admission of guilt and a sincere promise of remediation is given). In the short term, this fact-checking could even be crowdsourced from reputable sources where users could submit evidence of the veracity of a statement in real time with monitors checking the credibility of the sources cited. In reality, we’re already pretty close to this version being a reality with the number of folks who live-tweet broadcasts.
What are your thoughts? Continue the conversation on Twitter here.
