Also, it could just as easily be faked, like so much else. Even if someone offered such an assurance, I wouldn't trust random strangers on the internet. At best it would become an arms race between "this is not a real person" and those who sell fake assurances. And it would be one more weapon to damage anyone's reputation you don't like. "not a real person!"
By default you could choose not to trust. If you don't trust random strangers it's OK. So I don't see how it would damage someone's reputation worse than today.
It would potentially only add trust. Arguably, today we have bots because we have no other option than to trust without justification. With the public social graph, the trust above the baseline would be justifiable.
If I certify my racist thanksgiving ruining uncle is a real person that doesn’t actually help you avoid misinformation.
I honestly don’t care if the information I consume comes from a person or a robot. I only care if it is accurate or not. Those dimensions are orthogonal.
- "I, owner of account A, certify that owner of account B is human."
- "I, owner of account C, have a reason to trust/distrust the certification of account A about account B."
The collection of these statements would be the public social graph.
The social graph would then be used to establish provenance of facts, which are statements of the form:
- "I, owner of account B, certify account A being witness to event X."
Now whether to believe this or not depends on whether A certified B to be a human, and how much you transitively believe that statement.
So there is a kind of reversal - your statement about your uncle being human helps him to certify what you say, and vice versa.