Webs of trust can help isolate the issue, in that if you can trace news back to it's source, you can weight the relevance of the news according to the weights assigned to the friend's and your own weightings combined, in that particular web of trust (eg. A Web for cooking, a Web for politics etc).
The issue then is that you're likely to get a balkanization of the webs of trust - echo chambers.
How we can support cross pollination of these webs is the issue. I don't have an answer for that, but being able to trace news sources at least helps though.
First, this is missing the point a little bit - people don't care about the truth. They actively seek out channels of bias. If everyone were so conscientious as to be seeking the truth society would have far fewer problems.
Second, there is no such thing as 'web of trust', it's an academic idea.
Third, it's unnecessary. We already have pretty good institutions.
FYI I just checked the commentary on Fox to see where there plebes minds are at this morning, and this was the 4th comment on the top article:
"The military must restore President Trump to the presidency.
Any pockets of military resistance should be dealt with.
Our country needs military law and God's chosen President, President Trump.
President Trump for life!!!!"
A few comments down:
"MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW
FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT
STEALING AN ELECTION IS AN ACT OF WAR! FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT
STOP THE STEAL"
This kind of rhetoric is not uncommon now, and this is on a mainstream news outlet, it's only a little bit of accidental violence from words to deeds.
Yes, that was the point with the balkanisation bit. There's no grey area for debate as the echo-chambers polarise discussion.
Hence the real issue- how to persuade people to see news etc outside their usual fare. This could be simply a random post of the day on their feed, to a 'you may like' or 'the other side' on a post.
Far from being academic, webs of trust have existed since the dawn of time, for example marriage with other tribes to strengthen trust. On the web, twitter retweets are a loose example in that people retreat what they find useful, building trust between users over repeated retweets.
I don't know the answer to this btw but the current institutions don't appear to be enough, from potentially influenced elections and referenda, to trying to silence whistleblowers (Assange, Whitehouse leaks etc)
Isolating the issue though ie. Being able to verify optionally signed posts goes some way towards building better Web. Curated posts by Facebook have no indication of agenda or veracity, same as for most of twitter.
Something like Radicle or Spritely might be the way forward, more research needed :)
>how to persuade people to see news etc outside their usual fare
I'm not sure, but you actually need a place where people COULD see viewpoints outside the usual before those interested can go there.
An example of this working was the Slatestarcodex Culture War thread and its successor, The Motte.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...
It turns out that there's a sizeable contingent of people who do want to talk to people on the other side, and if you build it, they will come- and be surprisingly civil to each other, given you might expect them to assault each other on the streets in other circumstances.
Of course, as mentioned in the above article, one problem with building a space where people can talk civilly about their differences is that you end up talking civilly to unpalatable folks, and people on the outside really don't like that and will try to destroy you- even if what you're seeing here, people de-escalating by talking to each other, is a miracle in the making.
The culture war and the Motte have problems, of course. I'd just like to see a Cambrian explosion of spaces with a similar ethos, to explore the design space.
The issue then is that you're likely to get a balkanization of the webs of trust - echo chambers. How we can support cross pollination of these webs is the issue. I don't have an answer for that, but being able to trace news sources at least helps though.