Structured data markup towards preventing fake, deceptive, and manipulative content


Marking web content with Structured data standard such as schema would possibly prevent spam and deception. For example a blog post with structured data markup displaying a publish date and a modified date. A blog post is associated with a website domain name and indexed by a search engine. The simple markup of adding a publish date and a update date could eventually result in ending fake content on the web.

When you visit a video sharing platforms homepage. Videos displayed on a video sharing platform feed are usually the results of the choices of videos you decided to watch on your previous visit. By cognitive conditioning you probably would click on the same video you watched half a year ago when you visited. The channel author may have also uploaded the same video again to have the latest date along side video thumbnail.

You would think maybe it's better to just stick to reading blog posts and news publication articles. News publication is a business and with business there are recurring similar events and themes. This is partly due to the plight of our human condition to repeat our actions with slight variations. Also it's probably more lucrative for the author to not spend a lot of effort on a article about a similar event he or she wrote about multiple times before.

Schema structured data has become a standard. Usage of structured data involves encapsulating and adding attributes to existing HTML markup combined with markup found in documentation of Schema. A developer can manually modify website to add schema markup to a existing template of a content management system.

Unfortunately there is no incentive for a video sharing platform such as YouTube to be factual in displaying actual upload date and number of views. YouTube does provide a help tool demonstrated in this video by a YouTube user. This allows you to at least know the actual upload date of a video. You would have to initiate the process of finding the upload date by going through abuse filing procedures associated with video of interest on YouTube. Here is a video demonstration from a YouTube user on how to use the tool.

Z Data Tech Last modified: September 30, 2019