Let me describe an idea I heard from a very innovative person, which I think would be really useful right now in midst of the general election campaign.
The basic idea is to interpret politician’s or basically any talking head’s speech realtime and check the semantics against the Internet. Imagine a banner at the bottom of a TV screen with a line being drawn as the person talks.
If what the person says correlates positively with what can be found in reputable Internet sources, the line goes up and is green. There is evidence they are speaking the truth.
If what the person says correlates negatively with the sources, the line goes down and is red. There is evidence they are lying.
If what the person says does not correlate with the sources, the line is flat and brown, because they are spewing unadulterated bullshit.
I’d pay for this service.
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What you’re describing is fact checking
I think the idea is quite a bit more than fact checking. It is how you could package real-time fact checking as a service.
There are already people employed at news orgs that do live fact checking, including a ticker along the bottom. Though this could be useful for smaller news orgs
(I’m also US based, it might be more common over here (depending on the station 😭))
I like the idea, but it would have to work perfectly otherwise politicians would get very very upset when it didn’t work correctly and it could never work perfectly enough live.
We just need interlocutors who are willing to break in and say, “What you have just said has been proven to not be true, please try to be truthful to the electorate.” every time they lie.
