This is really interesting. It reminds me a bit of peer-reviewing journalism via Web annotation: https://web.hypothes.is/ https://web.hypothes.is/ I have a cou

This is really interesting. It reminds me a bit of peer-reviewing journalism via Web annotation: https://web.hypothes.is/ https://web.hypothes.is/ I have a couple comments to make as a former newspaper reporter: * Many important stories use anonymous sources that are impossible to verify via crowd-sourcing or by linking to official documents. Much of what happens in the world is not publicly documented nor is it widely known (until a reporter publishes a story). That gap between events and any record of those events is one of the structural problems that allow "fake news" to occur. * Timing matters. Reporters working for the dwindling number of publications that employ fact-checkers or editors have their facts checked before they publish. For that small group of outlets, this diminishes the number of falsehoods they are responsible for unleashing online. Fact-checking a story after its release is useful, but the cat's already out of the bag. The lie is already speeding around the world at the speed of viral outrage. * As with any platform where better information leads people to make different choices, there are lots of incentives for publications not engage in crowd-sourced fact-checking. Why do people lie or distort the facts on their dating profiles and job applications? Why do companies put forward their most utopian face? They are trying to shape the world with information. And so are media outlets such as Fox News, to name just the most egregious. * Fact-checking is a lot of work, and can descend into epistemological quibbles. Most people don't have time do engage in it, or even to understand the debate around a given fact. This is why, in the past, we outsourced this work to the editorial staff of the fourth estate. While this would bring more transparency to the process, I am not sure who would have time to take advantage of that transparency, anymore than the normal reader will closely follow the "talk" tab on a Wikipedia article.