Imagine the web that is not a noisy blur of advertising, fake news, and toxic social media, but a place where meaningful and credible content is easily found. A place where everyone feels safe, empowered, and accurately informed.

Unfortunately, this is not the web we have today. Toxic language, harassment, and fake or harmful content on the web is a massive problem that impacts everyone.

The existing solutions to this problem largely focus on ad hoc efforts to remove or filter content, an approach that is clearly failing while also threatening free expression and the open internet ecosystem.

Instead of asking how we can filter hateful and misleading content, we're asking: How can browser technology amplify credible and quality content and conversations?

Mozilla is a recognized leader in the field of online Privacy & Security committed to an internet that elevates civil discourse, human dignity, and individual expression. We're launching this challenge to identify approaches to using Firefox to find and promote credible sources of information online. (For a primer to technological approaches to access credibility online, see this report.)

We envision that an extension (or other browser technology solution) could be created to help users identify credible voices and credible sources of information online.

Such a browser extension/solution should be able to:

Identify online signals that indicate quality rather than virality and use these signals to point to high-quality, credible content;

Consider unique perspectives of groups who routinely experience racism, sexism, and other hateful language online;

Take into account know bot-driven content and behaviors; and,

Leverage existing open source (and/or CC-licensed) ML tools and datasets, yet not be heavily reliant on existing lists of "known words."

We want to emphasize that we will not consider solutions applying content filtering.

Important: Writing code fo the proposed solution is not required. What we're asking for is a well-thought concept and its design. Obviously, any relevant supporting materials, such as wireframes, mockups, paper prototypes, etc. will be highly welcome.