Tweet markets for impersonal truth tracking?

So instead of a disclaimer saying that a tweet is false, we'll now have a market saying that it probably will be declared false in the future. Then later the tweet will be declared 100% false and the market would close. But I don't see why you would trust the final result any more than the disclaimer. If you don't trust the social media companies then the prediction market just becomes "what people think social media companies will think" which doesn't solve the problem.

Edit: I missed that future users would vote to decide what the true outcome was but my point still stands. The prediction market would become "what people think people on social media will think". I know there has been work on solving this (Augur?) but I haven't read any of it.

Cool post! Daniel Kokotajlo and I have been exploring somewhat similar ideas.

In a nutshell, our idea was that a major social media company (such as Twitter) could develop a feature that incentivizes forecasting in two ways. First, the feature would automatically suggest questions of interest to the user, e.g., questions thematically related to the user’s current tweet or currently trending issues. Second, users who make more accurate forecasts than the community will be rewarded with increased visibility. 

Our idea is different in two major ways: 

I.
First, you suggest to directly bet on Tweets whereas as we envisioned that people would bet/forecast on questions that are related to Tweets. 

This seems to have some advantages: There would only be one question related to many thousands of Tweets. Rather than resolving thousands of Tweets, one would only have to resolve one question. Most Tweets are also very imprecise. In contrast, these questions (and their resolution criteria) could be formulated very precisely (partly because one could spend much more time refining them because they are much fewer in number). The drawback is that this might feel less "direct" and "fun" in some ways.

II.
Second, contrary to your idea, we had in mind that the questions would be resolved by employees and not voted on by the public. Our worry is that the public voting would dissolve in easily manipulated popularity contest that might also lead to increased polarization and/or distrust of the whole platform. But it is true that users might not trust employees of Twitter—potentially for good reason! 

Maybe one could combine these two ideas. Maybe the resolution of questions could be done by a committee or court that consists of employees and members of the public (and maybe other people that enjoy a high level of trust such as maybe popular judges or scientists?). Members of this committee could even undergo a selection and training process, maybe somewhat similar to the selection and training process of US juries which seem to be widely trusted to make reasonable decisions.

 

-

It seems pretty important to know who are the people who get to vote later on.  Since Twitter is a social network, is it people who are networked in some way, or is it random Twitter users, or...?  It seems like this could work very differently depending on exactly how it's implemented.  And how it works will influence whether anyone is willing to stake their cred on the results of a vote of this group of people.

What incentivizes anyone to vote at all, or to vote accurately?

Something like 80% of Americans think social media is doing just right or should be doing more to address misinformation (exact percentage depends on the category of information.)

If Twitter stopped, they'd lose some market share to competitors that do more fact checking. There are already popular social media networks that don't do that much checking, like reddit. Twitter itself does fact checking on fewer topics than Facebook. People can choose what level they're comfortable with, if that's important to them.