Bird-dogging the web

In Annotating the wild west of information flow I responded to President Obama’s appeal for “some sort of curating function that people agree to” with a Hypothes.is thought experiment. What if an annotation tool could make claims about the veracity of statements on the web, and record those claims in a standard machine-readable format such as ClaimReview? The example I gave there: a climate scientist can verify or refute an assertion about climate change in a newspaper article.

Today Mike Caulfield writes about another kind of fact-checking. At http://www.mostdamagingwikileaks.com/ he found this claim:

“Bird-dogging is a term coined by high-level Clinton staffers who openly talk about it in the video. They boast about inciting violence at Trump rallies, paying for every protest…”

Mike knows better.

Wait, what? Bird-dogging is about violence?

I was a bird-dogger for some events in 2008 and as a blogger got to know a bunch of bird-doggers in my work as a blogger. Clinton didn’t invent the term and it has nothing to do with violence.

So he annotates the statement. But he’s not just refuting a claim, he’s explaining what bird-dogging really means: you follow candidates around and film their responses to questions about your issues.

Now Mike realizes that he can’t find an authoritative definition of that practice. So, being an expert on the subject, he writes one. Which prompts this question:

Why the heck am I going to write a comment that is only visible from this one page? There are hundreds (maybe thousands) of pages on the internet making use of the fact that there is no clear explanation of this on the web.

Mike’s annotation does two things at once. It refutes a claim about bird-dogging on one specific page. That’s the sweet spot for annotation. His note also provides a reusable definition of bird-dogging that ought to be discoverable in other contexts. Here there’s nothing special about a Hypothes.is note versus a wiki page, a blog post, or any other chunk of URL-addressable content. An authoritative definition of bird-dogging could exist in any of these forms. The challenge, as Mike suggests, is to link that definition to many relevant contexts in a discoverable way.

The mechanism I sketched in Annotating the wild west of information flow lays part of the necessary foundation. Mike could write his authoritative definition, post it to his wiki, and then use Hypothes.is to link it, by way of ClaimReview-enhanced annotations, to many misleading statements about bird-dogging around the web. So far, so good. But how will readers discover those annotations?

Suppose Mike belongs to a team of political bloggers who aggregate claims they collectively make about statements on the web. Each claim links to a Hypothes.is annotation that locates the statement in its original context and to an authoritative definition that lives at some other URL.

Suppose also that Google News regards Mike’s team as a credible source of machine-readable claims for which it will surface the Fact Check label. Now we’re getting somewhere. Annotation alone doesn’t solve Mike’s problem, but it’s a key ingredient of the solution I’m describing.

If we ever get that far, of course, we’ll run into an even more difficult problem. In an era of media fragmentation, who will ever subscribe to sources that present Fact Check labels in conflict with beliefs? But given the current state of affairs, I guess that would be a good problem to have.