Is reputation determined merely by gossip? The incoming threat of weaponized gossip as a service

Gossip and the fabrication of reputation

Gossip is very powerful and can both bring up and tear down reputations. Gossip may include truth but is not necessarily restricted to truth. Complete lies, or lies within a mix of truth, are used to destroy the reputations of innocent people.

Information peddling as a service

Gossip because it is so easily spread and because of the invention of anonymous crypto-currencies, we may eventually see the rise of services which are set up to destroy anyone's reputation for a fee. Because gossip is so powerful and can be based on lies, but also benefit from network effect (if a lot of people say something then more people tend to believe it), then what can be done to protect innocent people from attack by false information or protect project from strategic gossip based social isolation?

Weaponized information and smear campaigns

Decision makers rely on truthful information from which to make wise decisions. Disinformation and misinformation surround us, and while for the most part the crypto-community has not descended into the sort of politics that we see typically in elections, I think it is only a matter of time. Because the community is still relatively small and the power positions are not quite as attractive as they are in other spaces in societies, the power politics which exist in these other places have not fully reached the crypto space. But we can know and see that sooner or later due both to technological evolution (smart contracts, anonymous currencies, decentralized ransomware, etc), that sooner or later the environment will turn ugly unless there are effective mechanisms of reputation management.

The risk of holding the keys to power is the threat of reputation damage and social engineering attacks

As we know with delegated Proof of Stake and other similar multi-signature setups, there can and will eventually be large sums of money and power protected only by keys/signatures. If there is a limited number of known individuals who hold these keys/signatures then each holder is identifiable as a key player, and as a key player these individuals will be the targets.

Delegated Proof of Stake deals with this potential problem by keeping the barrier to entry to become a delegate fairly low while also keeping it easy to remove corrupt nodes/delegates. This is fine if you can identify which nodes are the corrupt nodes but I would suggest that it might not even be possible to identify which nodes are the corrupt nodes, and worse it might not even be possible for you as an individual to determine if you're a corrupt node as you can be a corrupt node without knowing it. The only long term solution I can see is to keep the delegates either completely anonymous or pseudo-anonymous as a protection once the market cap of any delegated Proof of Stake based platform reaches a certain threshold.

References

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Borgatti, S. P. (2003). The key player problem (pp. 241-52). na.

Nycyk, M. (2015). The Power Gossip and Rumour Have in Shaping Online Identity and Reputation: A Critical Discourse Analysis. The Qualitative Report, 20(2), 18-32.

Peters, K., & Kashima, Y. (2014). Gossiping as moral social action: A functionalist account of gossiper perceptions. In Social Cognition and Communication. Sydney Symposium of Social Psychology, eds J. Forgas, O. Vincze, and J. László (New York, NY: Psychology Press) (pp. 185-201).

Web:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whispering_campaign