Politics in Social Networking: Ameritocracy
by
on June 30, 2008,
As part of the ongoing series about politics in social media, we turn our sites to political web site Ameritocracy. To its credit, this site differs somewhat from other political social sites. It doesn't try to be a strict social network around political candidate or opinion. It has a twist to help it stand out.
What Ameritocracy does is focus on what the candidates say. They are a quote submission, searching, rating, debating and sourcing site. Users log in, create their profile, and then can submit quotes or search for quotes by the political candidates of their choice. After they find or submit the quote they want, they have a chance to explore it deeper.
At first glance this seems innovative and fresh. What better way to encourage people to get involved in politics and really listen to what their representatives and potential representatives have to say than user generated content, right? Wrong!
Think of the spam emails you receive from your friends, relatives and co-workers. Those same people who have just enough internet access and just enough brain power to believe that Bill Gates will really send them 5 cents for every email they forward about Microsoft are the same ones that perpetuate rumor emails and false information about politicians.
Now imagine them on Ameritocracy, and you begin to see the issue. When anyone can submit any bastardized quote and claim anyone said it under the guise of "finding the truth", that's a recipe for trouble. Alternatively, someone can put up a real quote and a troll can challenge it.
It's hard enough to weed out good information from bad online already. Do we really need a site like this that encourages potential false information contributed by users? It reminds me of the trouble Wikipedia keeps running into with vetting and verification, only on a much smaller scale.
Overall, I'm going to have to pass on Ameritocracy. It's a unique concept and a nice, easy to use design. However, the potential for trouble and the need for fact checking is high, and in an election year, we need more truth, not less.
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Bighorn
kalipso
Mav
Opensource 
Michael Fidler 
Leslie - thanks for the post and giving what we’re doing a good look.
“It’s hard enough to weed out good information from bad online already.” Your mention of stupid email forwards is perfect, as we think of ourselves, in part, as a user-powered Snopes.com.
That weeding-out problem exactly what we’re hoping to address - make it easier to get to good, credible content much more quickly. But you’re on to the problem with user-generated content, which is that if anyone can say anything, and worse, have it under a brand/logo proclaiming some form of credibility, then you may have mob rule, not wisdom of the crowd.
There are two keys (that we can probably do a better job emphasizing in our language):
1 - Community tools for self-moderation.
2 - Reputation.
If a user submits a bastardized quote (which must have a cited source), the community can flag that quote as a Misquote, Out of Context, and others. This reduces the user’s reputation score, marks this quote as a Misquote, and removes this particular quote’s ratings from the reputation score of whoever said the quote. So, if Joe submits a quote by John McCain, and the community identifies it as a misquote, Joe takes a reputation hit while McCain is not impacted.
Reputation - where users are given credit for contributing good quotes and writing quality, source-cited responses, and dinged for misquotes and the like - creates a strong incentive to create good content. As our system matures, even votes will weigh slightly according to reputation. We’ll post a document on the site soon that explains our approach to Reputation that should help.
Bottom line: it’s open to anyone, including the informed and the ignorant. But with cumulative reputation over time to help identify the most credible participants, and a structured content system that requires source-citing, Ameritocracy does not “encourage potential false information contributed by users” any more than Wikipedia or any blogging platform - in fact, it reduces the chance for false information upfront, and we’re building the community tools to moderate bad info that slips through.
Try it out to see if you agree.
Thanks!
Porter
Founder, Ameritocracy