Let me tell you a story…

It’s about a young man in America. He’s young twenties, white, college-educated, leans liberal, and is passionate about his causes. He gets most of his information from the internet. 

One day he comes across a sizzler of a news article. He’s thinking this is THE hard-hitting news of the month. He’s getting more and more excited as he reads it.

He’s seeing all the connections to (Insert controversial rage-machine topic of the day) and having massive realizations about all the Truth (capitalized on purpose) contained in this single piece of HTML text, that contains second, maybe even third-hand information, published by a random person who may or may not just be quoting another piece of content that they found.

As this young man continues to read he’s feeling more and more seen, understood. He’s connecting to the message of the article and it’s telling him that his beliefs are right, moral, and correct, maybe even superior. Dopamine (the feel good neurotransmitter) floods his body and brain, confirming in his body that this article is awesome! 

He can’t even wait to finish the article before forwarding it to his group text thread with all his young twenties, white, college-educated, left-leaning friends. As he’s sharing to the group he exclaims, “You all HAVE to read this. So good…”. 

All his friends love the article and might even be spreading to other group texts they’re in. But, our protagonist made a critical error. A week later he comes to find out that the article he sent was based on untrue and misleading statements. 

Oops… the damage is already done. 

So, what’s this story about and why am I telling it? 

What I’m explaining is the modern information-dissemination engine, AKA the social media echo chamber. And, it’s not unique to the white, college-educated, liberal. I can substitute all of the demographic information and the story will still ring true. 

Why? Because human’s gossip. We love to share juicy bits of information with our close peer group.

From an evolutionary lens, humans developed gossip to select for certain “acceptable” behaviors and remove undesirable behaviors from the group. 

Two hundred thousand years ago if you were the guy/gal who decided to fall asleep on the night watch or let the fire go out, spreading gossip about your mistake would create cultural pressure to improve your behavior. If not, you could face the ultimate price at that time, social expulsion and certain death. 

Gossip can be an example of beneficial and cultural shame that optimizes for group cohesion and safety. 

My point being that this urge to gossip is part of our evolutionary psychology. It’s an innate part of our social order. And, when used in the right way can help our society and culture create a strong method for encouraging certain behaviors and discouraging others. 

In many ways, we’re still the same as our long-ago ancestors two hundred thousand years ago. But, instead of getting our gossip from our neighbor, a friend, the local butcher, or another geographically-centered community member, our modern world allows us to gossip with total strangers from across the planet. 

“Hell yeah! I love that. I can now connect to the millions of people who all see the world just like me.”

Wait a second… is that actually a good thing? 

We live in a world where it’s easier than ever to publish content on the internet (hey, thanks for reading 😀), consume information that makes us “feel good” (aka confirms our biases), and share that information far and wide without needing to know (or even having a reliable way of knowing) if it’s true. 

We’ve lost control of our gossip. 

And, I’m not talking about teenage girl gossip… I’m talking about the gossip that creates positive social cohesion. The kind of gossip that weeds out dangerous thoughts, behaviors, and cultural norms. The kind of gossip that praises, celebrates, and solidifies community. 

“Ok, Jared, interesting but what does this have to do with technology or innovation?”

Social media and the internet are the main mediums through which we receive misinformation, disinformation (misinformation spread by a government or organization), and propaganda. 

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, the human brain (including yours!) is easy to hotwire. Press the right buttons, say the right words, confirm the right biases and the human brain turns into a pile of mush (floods with all the feel good chemicals) that kind of believes whatever is in front of it, fact or fiction.

And, the tools of misinformation are only getting more sophisticated. Check out this Tik Tok profile that does hilarious deep fake impressions of Tom Cruise and other celebrities (a deep fake is a video impersonation that’s made using computer-generated video effects). 

“So we’re screwed, right? The Russian and the Chinese governments are hijacking our open social media networks and using them to sow population-wide division using hot-button topics like race and politics?” 

Yes, definitely. And, it’s a certainty that this is already happening. But, I’m an optimist. I have faith that technology will help us take back control of our gossip and use it for building a more cohesive society instead of using it to divide us. 

And, one new technology could have the power to create transparent and trusted online media. It’s called a non-fungible token or NFT. 

And while right now the main use for NFTs are “Bored Apes” and “Crypto Punks” the same principle of digital scarcity, authenticity, and proof creates the opportunity for us to track, verify, and judge the quality of information being spread through social platforms.

(Don’t know what an NFT is? Go to the bottom of the article for a quick definition)

Because anything digital can be copied and replicated to infinity, NFTs create digital information that can be traced to a source and authenticated. 

Creating a Decentralized “Blue Check”

What our open social media networks lack is a decentralized (meaning the decision makers at facebook/Youtube are not also the ones verifying the information) method for tracking the source of information. Fact checkers are not enough.

We need to know who is generating the controversial content and the veracity of these accounts. And we need a reliable way to judge the quality of the content shared by these accounts, anonymous or not.

By combining NFTs (which prove ownership of content) and other forms of tracing and tracking the original source of the information (remember when we had to run our school papers through a plagiarism detector program?) we can create a library of which content and accounts share valid information and which do not. 

And, I’m not talking about a true/false narrative. That’s a lose-lose game. If we’ve learned anything from 2020 it’s that the truth is rarely black and white.   

But, creating a social and digital media organization that uses NFTs and other forms of indexing (basically what Google does with the entire internet) we can create a more accurate scale by which to judge information. 

Is the original source of this information associated with any known foreign state actors? Was it generated from a known account with a long history or from a virgin account with just one post? Has the original source of information been modified? 

These questions can generate the answers that help us make better decisions and know what content is high-quality, low-quality, or just straight propaganda. 

Because, let me remind you, propaganda and disinformation exist. And, it’s pervasive across social media. Just go to a high-profile politician’s (Joe Biden or Kamala) Twitter post. You’ll see thousands of comments from bots and accounts with an agenda. 

But let me close with this. I know one thing to be true… humans are not going to stop gossiping. But, if we can gossip with better, more accurate information, that creates social harmony, I think this can help us heal many of the wounds we’re inflicting on each other today. 

There’s a long road ahead. And today, it’s on each of us to filter out the signal from the noise. I’m hopeful that in the next five years we’ll get over this hump and have a better way, a programmatic and non-centralized way, for categorizing misinformation and propaganda. 

That way, instead of the little-liberal-Johnny I wrote about at the top of this article sending propaganda to his group text echo chamber, he can be shamed (in a positive way, of course) when sharing low-quality information associated with accounts that share falsehoods. 

P.S. The engine that drives NFTs is the Ethereum network. Ethereum is my top choice in the crypto world for the future of Web3 and the decentralized web. Check out my explainer article on Ethereum HERE.

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NFTs create a cryptographic (secure) method for verifying the authenticity of digital information (text files, images, etc).

Think of it like the signed piece of paper you get when you purchase a piece of art or sports memorabilia that proves its authenticity. NFTs are the digital version of that.