What are we trying to achieve with the "authentic web"?

[lrosenthol]

From #12

What are we trying to achieve with an "authentic web"? Is it to #12 (comment) in case they want to spend the time to verify them; to increase the chance that a person who visits a web page quickly develops the same beliefs as if they'd taken the time to investigate it; to increase the fraction of pages that are "authentic"; or something else?

[lrosenthol]

I would put forth that you first need to define what you mean by "authentic". As I noted in #12 (comment) - authentic doesn't necessary mean true.

The web already has a way (TLS) to establish that the content being presented was unmodified from when it was sent, and it was sent from a "verified" site. What is missing there?

I would point out that such a system only gets you the primary content - but because of linking, iframes, scripting and the like, doesn't actually "guarantee" that what the author of the page created is what the end user is seeing. (and that doesn't into account browser extensions!). Approaches like SRI (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Subresource_Integrity) tried to address some of those limitations - but never saw adoption. I note that there work on an SRI-2 that just started (https://www.w3.org/TR/sri-2/), but who knows what will happen there....

[TzviyaSiegman]

Excerpt from the mission of Credible Web CG

The mission of the W3C Credible Web Community Group is to help shift the Web toward more trustworthy content without increasing censorship or social division. We want users to be able to tell when content is reliable, accurate, and shared in good faith, and to help them steer away from deceptive content. At the same time, we affirm the need for users to find the content they want and to interact freely in the communities they choose. To balance any conflict between these goals, we are committed to providing technologies which keep end-users in control of their Web experience.

Authentic Web Workshop is trying to achieve:

• enable users to detect when content is reliable/credible
• steer users away from deceptive content without limiting interactions
• understand chain of information/events that leads to credibility and/or misinformation
• understand what can be standardized (vs what is human behavior)

See also w3c/strategy#483