Putting Us Back in the Picture
Something happened in the Fall of 2017 that I did not expect. Before then, I had been dedicated to transitioning my PDF software business into a next generation of data and document services. Life was busy and I had been working on developing and building next generation compute and data storage hardware as a basis for document services. Then in the fall of 2017, a series of seemingly unrelated events, technology, and previous experiences converged to open the door to a whole new opportunity for authenticated information collection.
To set the stage, from 1998 to 2001, I had the privilege of working on a federal government and industry consortium that developed a system for electronic payment instruments to replace paper checks. One of the main lessons of that program was that the exchange of value starts with authenticated participants. I learned important lessons about why public key infrastructures and digital certificates fail in real world applications. I created new mechanisms for authenticating a digital store of value and for reliable messaging to transport valuable digital documents. By 2003, I was using PDF documents and optical character recognition to embrace and extend the notion of trustable documents. These technologies were to play a future role in this new application.
Fast forward to 2017. We started getting more widespread reports that huge numbers of “people” on social media are not people at all, but are software robots (also called “bots”) that masquerade as real people. At the same time, the amount of disputed information on social media was exploding. The term “fake news” was coined to describe this disputed information. No one could agree on how to define fake news, much less control it.
The social media companies found themselves on the cutting edge of this disputed information and struggled with how to address the issues. The Vice President of Public Policy, Gov & Philanthropy at Twitter posts “Our approach to bots and misinformation” in June. In that post, he addressed the issue of how Twitter deals with bots and fake news. Interestingly, he stated, “While bots can be a positive and vital tool, from customer support to public safety, we strictly prohibit the use of bots and other networks of manipulation to undermine the core functionality of our service.”
In my world, I found it hard to imagine any scenario in which “bots can be a positive and vital tool.” If only a few people want to convince everyone else to adopt an idea, then bots might be a great tool. But if we are living in a society in which government is “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” then how can bots be anything but manipulative and corrosive to equality, fairness, and democracy? What has become increasingly clear to most everyone is that bots are not generally beneficial for our culture or our self-government.
What are our choices here? Current social media platforms and the Internet are not designed to prevent software bots from masquerading as real people. The first Internet design (Web 1.0) was mainly electronic brochure web sites that simply published information on the Internet. The next generation designs (Web 2.0) added interactive services so that the readers could comment and add information, in effect becoming self-publishers. It is from Web 2.0 that we get all our current social media services such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others. But Web 2.0 has no widespread means of preventing software robots from acting like real people. As I write this in January 2023, Elon Musk has purchased Twitter and is trying to limit the effect of bots, but bots are still marching on. Some say that we now need Web 3.0 to have a fully authenticated web experience. Many suggest blockchain as a means to accomplish this authentication. However, most if not all of this work is extremely early stage and very naïve in its assumptions.
I had a bit of a personal panic when I thought about the logical outcome of losing our voice to bots and the effect on our representative democracy. So, in 2017, I asked this simple question: Is there a way that real people can share honest opinions in our Internet-based world? Is there a way to create a service that will solve the bot problem and allow real people to participate by expressing their anonymous opinions in a believable fashion?
In my spare time, I began to retool some previous ideas into a technology that would let people speak about ideals, values, opinions, and dreams that are important to them. I immediately realized that this technology has two distinct branches of opportunities. The first branch of opportunities are commercial and include services for private opinion polling as well as corporate and public elections. The second branch of opportunities are non-profit public opinion polling services that are dedicated to voter research.
In January 2019, AmericaThinks was incorporated to carry out the non-profit mission and received approval as a 501(c)3 non-profit later that year. The mission of AmericaThinks is to help every American voter be seen for who they are and heard for what they believe.
Today this technology has become known as Reliable Opinion Polling and is currently the subject of two patent applications. I am donating a license for both the technology and software implementation of Reliable Opinion Polling to AmericaThinks. The journey has been eventful, with lots of lessons along the way and more sure to come. Reliable Opinion Polling seems to have reached a milestone and it is time to introduce this new generation of public opinion polling.
By early 2024, AmericaThinks is scheduled to be publicly available as a tool for real registered voters to share anonymous opinions with the world in real-time. This is a huge addition to and advancement of the state of the art in public opinion polling.
What are my best hopes for AmericaThinks? In short, I hope that AmericaThinks is a tool to put us back into the picture – the picture of culture, the picture of governance, the picture of real life in our communities. My hope is AmericaThinks is platform where we can rid ourselves of robotic manipulation. I hope that we feel free to express our honest opinions and know that our neighbors are expressing their honest opinions too. I hope that when we start with honesty, we can begin to work together more closely to solve our issues. My hope is that our representatives will hear our voices, seek to understand, and work with us to find a better path for our self-government. I hope that AmericaThinks can become a catalyst for equality, fairness, and more responsive representative democracy.
Over the course of the coming months, this blog will unfold the story of AmericaThinks. So much of what is happening here is breaking new ground, learning new lessons, and opening the door to new opportunities. I welcome you to this journey in the hopes that we will all be better tomorrow than we are today.