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Elon Musk has floated the idea of creating Pravda, a web site that would allow users to rate/review the credibility of media organizations and journalists. Pravda Corp. was formed in Delaware and incorporated in California, according to an October 19, 2017 filing. Jared Birchall, a director at Musk's Boring Company, is President of Pravda Corp., and the addresses are identical:
Musk's idea quickly raised concerns that the reputation of news organizations and reporters could be determined by what could be an easy to manipulate online popular vote.
"Elon's next company: Rate My Professor but for Journalists. What a great idea that won't be gamed immediately in extremely predictable ways," Rene DiResta, who researches computation propaganda and is a policy lead at Data For Democracy, wrote on Twitter.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia, told CNN such a service might might make sense if it employed a careful methodology and was overseen by an independent journalism foundation.
"It's not a crackpot idea," he said. "The question is why should Elon Musk be the one running it and how trustworthy would it be if he ran it."
Musk has been criticized a lot lately.
Also at The Verge, New Statesman, and The Washington Post.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 28 2018, @04:47PM
This kind of site is mostly useful for preventing any sort of honest evaluation. It's bad enough that advertisers can pull their ad buys from an outlet if they don't like the press, having a site where they can use it to slander journalists that actually do their jobs is ridiculous.