unethicist

We have a really good idea about our social network trust in hour heads and we keep updating it, but it seems hard to transfer to a device or even verbalize.

yup yup yup. I hadn't thought about the A/B comparison approach, I like that.

I also think you need to have separate weights for "how much I trust this person" and "how much I trust this person's weights". Going back to my "gullible friend" example - I might trust their first-hand stories perfectly well, but would trust them much less than my other peers when it comes to relaying second-hand information.

Yes, I've also been thinking about this a lot, and reached similar conclusions.

One of the main issues I can't think my way around is privacy. I don't want my full and true trust network to be publicly available, although I might provide a more detailed map to my trusted peers. I might also "lie" about a given weight depending on who asks, for diplomatic purposes (perhaps you have a close friend who also happens to be rather gullible).

A working system is going to take a lot of effort on behalf of each user to correctly and accurately annotate their own trust graphs, on an ongoing basis - perhaps this just too impractical.

I performed a slightly unethical experiment many years ago, In which I created an entirely fake Facebook account (back when people actually used Facebook), and slowly sent out friend requests to personal acquaintances. All it takes is one or two to get started, and every subsequent person sees "n mutual friends" and is more likely to accept the random request. It snowballed from there, and eventually I had "infiltrated" a non-trivial portion of my own social network with an entirely fictional persona.

(Ethics note: I only sent friend requests to people I was already friends with on my real account - so I wasn't obtaining any new private information I wouldn't otherwise have had access to - and I didn't perform any interactions beyond sending friend requests)

Any kind of trust network is going to need to deal with this sort of infiltration - and I'm not sure how.

And another thing - trust is bought and sold all the time. Social media influencers sell a small fragment of their trust level every time they do a paid endorsement. If there's some kind of explicit trust network, people will pay others to obtain a higher trust level. Is there anything we can do about that?