How are we going to provide that evidence? And make sure that evidence is actually true, instead of AI generated? Send them a link to a wiki page that has been mutated by an AI bot updating it? ;-)
A) independently verifiable facts, for example you can apply the scientific method to the hypothesis that the earth is not flat (make predictions that should follow from that, and test those experimentally); or
B) data provenance. If some crackhead says that the US government is conducting brainwashing experiments you might discard that, if the government answers a Freedom of Information Act request with documentation about brainwashing experiments conducted by the CIA then you have good reason to count them as evidence. And you spread the word about this by showing the proof to a reputable newspaper who write about it, or writing a book and publishing it at a publisher known for fact-checking what they publish.
Anything that isn't independently verifiable or has a chain of provenance is already hearsay. In the age of social media we got used to basing a lot of decisions on hearsay, so maybe we have to dial that back. But AI being better at generating hearsay doesn't mean it gets better at creating evidence.
But as for the case of the Fauci emails from FOIA requests no "reputable" newspaper reported on it. So people still to this day dismiss it since it did not come from a "reputable" source despite the fact you can confirm the provenance and authenticity of these documents by confirming with the agency that released the documents
Writers should adopt two habits: (1) Sign your statements. If you say something, sign it, so that others know you said it. Cryptography is good at this. (2) Hash your citations. If you cite something, include a hash of it. This way, if the thing you cited is altered, readers can tell that that's not what you were citing. Note that this idea can be applied to audio and video, not just text.
The rest of the responsibility falls on readers:
(1) Read (i.e. consider) citations.
(2) Read (i.e. consider) the sources of evidence you ingest.
Don't just find a video and believe it happened. Determine who has claimed to have witnessed those events.
For this, a public database of back-references might be helpful. But even without one, a decentralized solution is possible. Writers, whenever they cite something, could simply send their citation (and its context) to the author of the cited material. If the cited author attaches the back-citation to the content that was cited, then anyone who comes across the content can see who has cited it.
There is of course the problem that some back-citations will be rejected -- if you cite what I wrote to call it stupid, I am unlikely to want to share that fact with the world. But if what I wrote is sufficiently important, then hopefully someone will waht to host a "nemesis" site, which collects negative citations.
A public database of nemesis sites would be helpful.
(3) Read (i.e. consider) the reputations of authors you read.
This is nearly the reverse of the last point. When deciding whether to believe what someone has said, consider what else they have said.
This is of course a hard problem. An author might be qualified in one area and writing about another. An author's reputation might be damaged for extrinsic (e.g. malice) reasons, rather than intrinsic ones.
But a statement's author is too important a context to ignore.
(4) Do cool graph-traversing investigations.
Determine who someone tends to cite. Identify misinformation cliques -- close-knit collections of liars who all cite each other. Identify readership patterns that make people productive.
We have seen how social network information can make a corporation money. As a society, I suspect there is a similar amount of value to be extracted from them.
Yep, that's only some of the methods which can be employed to ensure authenticity and integrity of information. A lot more are possible.
The parent comment, mentions that an encyclopedia page can be modified by a bot. That holds true for wikipedia, but we can create encyclopedias strictly edited only by humans.
Just have a prominent individual issue a top ecdsa identity, with correspondence to the real person's name info known only to him. He publishes that ecdsa identity somewhere, let's say on a blockchain to be always available and secure from deletion. Let's say this prominent individual is the Ronaldo football player. He publishes 1000 ecdsa identities to a public digital highway somewhere, all of the real names connection known only to him. That set of 1000 identities is called Ronaldo's social graph.
From then on, each child identity derived from the top identity, when they edit a wikipedia page, they are pseudonymous if they like. No need to reveal their name, only Ronaldo knows that, but we know they are human, because Ronaldo has met everyone in person in order to issue the top identity. But pseudonymous is only as far as they can go, because someone will always know their real name. A.I. actually spells the end of anonymity on the internet.
One more property of an organization structure like that, is that as soon as a person loses his wikipedia account for some reason, he can always get it back, because he can create a new ecdsa child identity, and prove that his older account and his new, match exactly the same top identity. So he can always invalidate older accounts and use the same data, karma etc, with new accounts.
The only downside of that organization structure, is that top identities which belong to the public social graph, have to be absolutely secure. As soon as a person loses his top identity, Ronaldo has to issue a new one, but the encyclopedia cannot invalidate accounts not matching the top identity in an automated way, if the real name is not published. That means a human on the other side has to be involved and boureocracy ensues.
