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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: 2) by coolgopher on Tuesday May 29 2018, @01:15AM (1 child)
Your comment and mine are not mutually exclusive. I do however remember a time before the media solely became the playground of the powerful. Or at least, a time when they weren't so blatant about it.
Do I think Pravda will work/be a good idea? No, odds are it'll be trolled, flamed, botted, heckled and hacked into oblivion, just like any other brightly painted target on the internet. Might it still be a worthwhile exercise despite that? Possibly. The Streissand Effect could potentially lead to some changes, but what they would be and if they'd be for the good, I cannot guess.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Tuesday May 29 2018, @01:53AM
Agreed. Sometimes failure can be a great teacher - not just to the person but others observing. What's worse is to not even try. Musk maybe cuckoo and/or have his own sinister agenda, but I applaud him for at least trying not matter how futile or dumb. In this regards, he's done more, no matter how infinitesimally small, than the armchair critics. Even if the news of this stupidity makes a single person realize a tiny bit that they may have to learn to exercise some doubt to their daily news feed is potentially a seed worth planting.