[dbot]

Exactly this. You are just abstracting the decision about "truth" to another set of observers.

Every crowdsourced news aggregation site faces the same challenge, too. Digg had serious vote manipulation problems. Reddit's /r/politics section was overrun by pro-Clinton activists, etc. Concerted, concentrated effort can almost always overpower the consensus of average users.

EDIT: to be clear, my point is that if/when this becomes a powerful tool, the incentive to aim it at a broader or different set of goals is overwhelming.

[colllectorof]

Tools for analyzing information can work, but they need to help the person using them make their own judgements, rather than delegate the whole process to some third party or opaque model/algorithm.

This is the same basic difference that you can see between good and bad science lectures in schools. Bad lectures give students a bunch of formulas they have to trust and memorize. Good lectures describe how the world works, which they can confirm through their own observations and experiments.

Anything that relies on blind trust in some curator will eventually have the exact same problems news most media has right now.

[tptacek]

These aren't crowdsourced news aggregator sites. These are webspam sites, spun the same way any other webspam site is spun (with scripts and templates). The only thing that makes them interesting is that their payload is 1-2 carefully produced political stories, not a sales call-to-action.