There is too much deception in journalism these days. The rise of social media upped the pressure to get stories shared resulting in clickbait reporting where truthfulness has taken a backseat to popularity. In the past, editors assured that journalists did their due diligence and were truthful. Now the burden is on the reader to assure what journalists write is true. That's a lot of work, too much work for any one person. Independent fact checkers aren't helping. They have failed so miserably that even the British Medical Journal lashed out at their incompetence. What is the alternative? Trust Commando. Trust Commando gives power to the people by enabling crowd-sourced fact checking and accountability of journalism.Users root out falsehoods with verified due diligence then reward honesty and punish deception through Credibility Scores: easy to read accounts of a journalist's record that reads just like a credit score. This critical step will discourage further untruthfulness. Journalists will prioritize the truth when they realize the hordes will be checking their facts and updating their public credibility score. Reddit Apes have crowdsourced due diligence for investing. Trust Commando will do it for journalism. This product is a marriage of two ideas, credibility scores proposed by Elon Musk and verified due diligence done by Reddit Apes. 

Not all lies are equal in the eyes of a Credibility Score. If a journalist publishes a falsehood and it is used at a trial or to set government policy, that is decimating for their credibility score. It's the equivalent of a bankruptcy on their credit score. If a journalist gets the age of a celebrity wrong it will have a very minor effect on their credibility score. In addition to journalists having their overall Credibility Score, each of their articles will have their own credibility score with a breakdown of what is not true. 

Building the software is not the biggest challenge for this project. Nate and Tim are both full stack developers (Scala, React) and have the skills and experience to make the software work. The biggest challenge is putting together the Trust Commando community. We need a community of smart and logical contributors, Trust Commandos, who are reading multiple sources, doing data checks and enjoy being detectives. It's easy to convict someone if you just listen to the prosecuting attorney. However, it's completely unfair.  Just as you need a prosecuting and defense attorney at a trial, we will need Trust Commandos with differing points of view.  We also anticipate people trying to game the system. Trust Commando will be built from the ground up with this in mind. The goal must be getting to the truth even when the truth is unpopular. If we can build a community dedicated to that goal we will succeed.