The trust.txt system has been working away in the background of the internet for several years now. As of today, it is also now operating in a way that can be viewed by real people.
The heart of the trust.txt idea is that trust is shared among groups. If, for example, the Texas Press Association has a publisher member, a reader can decide that paper is trustworthy based on that association.
But if a regular reader looks at a page, how is that reader to know that a paper actually does belong to the TPA? The paper could put a badge or a link that says that is the case, but a scammer could also say that.
Similarly, scammers often create fake profiles on social networks and claim that it is associated with the name of a publisher. That is, you might look at a Facebook page that says it is the page for the Dripping Springs News, but it may have been created by someone faking it just to look more legit and there was no way for a reader to know. Again, that scammer could put a link to the newspaper site, but that doesn’t prove anything.
Now there is a solution to those problems.
The solution is a small badge that can appear on any site, or on any social network profile or “about” page.
The problem with badges, of course, is that they can also be faked. But this badge can not be faked because the badge is not on the page, but instead comes from a browser extension for Chrome, Edge and Firefox.
Once installed, the browser extension actually goes and looks at the connection and only if it is an actual connection will it show a blue badge, which when hovered over describes the nature of the connection.
Here is what that looks like in real life:
VIDEO HERE
As you can see in that video, it is super easy.
For social networks, the account owner just adds trust://example.com! to the profile section of the account.
For web pages, just add that same trust://example.com! text to the page wherever you like, but probably near the bottom with the other footer information makes the most sense. With that snip of text on a web page, you can make it a link so that if a reader wants to know what that trust link means, they can easily learn more. (Feel free to link to this post, or you are welcome to copy this post and put it on your own site and link to that.)
The scourge of misinformation has only grown worse in recent years, and it looks like it will not be going away but only get more intense as AI tools get better. We hope this tool will be a significant part of legitimate publishers fighting back.
Thanks for this amazing step forward go to the IPTC for its general encouragement of finding ways of increasing transparency and specifically for introducing us to Christian Paquin from Microsoft, who found a way to solve the very difficult problem of having one page automatically get verifying information from another page using the new Cross-Platform Origin of Content platform. Thanks also to JournalList board member Ralph Brown who built the extensions based on some of Christian’s work and got them approved by three different browser extension review teams.