Depends on the algorithm to determine whether “you seriously lied”.
Imagine a hypothetical situation where telling the truth puts you in danger, but you read this offer, think “well, I am telling the truth, so they will protect my anonymity”, and describe truthfully your version. Unluckily for you, your opponent lied, and was more convincing than you. Afterwards, because your story contradicts the accepted version of events, it seems that you were lying, accusing unfairly the people who are deemed innocent. As a punishment for “seriously lying”, your identity is exposed.
If people with sensitive information suspect that something like this could happen, then it defeats the purpose of the proposal.
Yeah, that seems like a big potential flaw. (Which could just mean, no one should stick their neck out like that.) I’m imagining that there’s only potential benefit here in cases where the accounter also has strong trust in the poster, such that they think the poster almost certainly won’t be falsely convinced that a truth is an egregious lie.
In particular, the agreement isn’t about whether the court of public opinion decides it was a lie, just the poster’s own opinion. (The poster can’t be held accountable to that by the public, unless the public changes its mind again, but the poster can at least be held accountable by the accounter.) (We could also worry that this option would only be taken by accounters with accounts that are infeasible to ever reveal as egregious lies, which would be a further selection bias, though this is sort of going down a hypothetical rabbit hole.)
Depends on the algorithm to determine whether “you seriously lied”.
Imagine a hypothetical situation where telling the truth puts you in danger, but you read this offer, think “well, I am telling the truth, so they will protect my anonymity”, and describe truthfully your version. Unluckily for you, your opponent lied, and was more convincing than you. Afterwards, because your story contradicts the accepted version of events, it seems that you were lying, accusing unfairly the people who are deemed innocent. As a punishment for “seriously lying”, your identity is exposed.
If people with sensitive information suspect that something like this could happen, then it defeats the purpose of the proposal.
Yeah, that seems like a big potential flaw. (Which could just mean, no one should stick their neck out like that.) I’m imagining that there’s only potential benefit here in cases where the accounter also has strong trust in the poster, such that they think the poster almost certainly won’t be falsely convinced that a truth is an egregious lie.
In particular, the agreement isn’t about whether the court of public opinion decides it was a lie, just the poster’s own opinion. (The poster can’t be held accountable to that by the public, unless the public changes its mind again, but the poster can at least be held accountable by the accounter.) (We could also worry that this option would only be taken by accounters with accounts that are infeasible to ever reveal as egregious lies, which would be a further selection bias, though this is sort of going down a hypothetical rabbit hole.)