09-29-2023 11:56 AM - edited 09-29-2023 11:58 AM
Today I just discovered that Firefox is included in the Mozilla Information Trust Initiative, or MITI, described as "a comprehensive effort to keep the Internet credible and healthy" by "developing products, research, and communities to battle information pollution and so-called ‘fake news’ online," also commonly known as misinformation. I was a little confused regarding how exactly you intend to battle the misinformation. Are you going to be filtering content so that only information that passes your scrutiny will be seen by users of Firefox? If that's the case, who gets to decide what's truth and what isn't, and by whose standards? In the wrong hands, this kind of power could easily be abused to limit what users see to just the content that those with that power want them to see, such as advertisements or recommendations for certain brands or products while others get omitted. I don't know you any better than you know me, and I wouldn't expect you to trust me with that kind of power over your content. This may be an outright infringement of First Amendment rights as well.
My feedback regarding MITI and its associated efforts is to back off and let users decide for themselves what's truth and what isn't. Truth always wins in the end.
10-13-2023 10:29 AM
And we have to remember that the U.S. Government is the biggest purveyor of misinformation, so who do we trust?