Boost the Antibodies

We Should Put Fact-Checking Tools In the Core Browser

I get that most people won’t use these tools. But my model of how this impacts society is not that everyone makes use of these tools, but that the five percent of people who do create a herd immunity that helps protect others from the worst nonsense. We can’t make every cell invulnerable, but we can boost the antibodies that are already in the system.

Mike Caulfield is talking about fact checking and misinformation on the web, but this same perspective could be applied to the indieweb as well. As long as a certain few remain outside of walled gardens, we can inoculate the web as a whole against the various dangers of those ecosystems. As I think about the kind of tooling I continue to be interested in building for creatives, but simultaneously think about the seeming dearth of market forces demanding such tools, this is a helpful metaphor.

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