The closed-captioning mark belongs to no company and works on every screen. We propose the same for perspective: an open, opt-in standard for a universal button — adoptable by any platform, publisher, or browser, with the reader choosing what powers it.
Because it adds speech rather than restricting it, it's an approach people can support across a political spectrum that agrees on little else about the internet.
Talk standards with us →Crowd-written notes on major platforms measurably slow the spread of misleading posts. They are the clearest proof yet that readers accept added perspective beneath content. But each system is owned by one company, drawn from one user base, and limited by volunteer labor — most posts that deserve a note never get one, and the note often arrives after the post has done its work.
And much of what divides people is not false at all — it is true-but-partial, one accurate fragment of a bigger story. No takedown or fact-check verdict can address that. A layer that shows the landscape of a conversation can — and building it in the open is a chance to make the internet itself work better: prosocial infrastructure, owned by no one, in the web's own plumbing.
A standard travels across services, so the same mark works on a news site, a blog, and a social feed.
Perspectives drawn from across the web — not just whoever happens to volunteer inside a single platform.
Built for contested questions where the honest answer is "it depends who you ask" — and shows you who's answering.
A universal symbol any reader can spot on any surface — and ignore just as easily. It appears beside content; it never interrupts it.
A common shape for what opens: the perspectives around a story, how each frames it, where they agree, and the sources each draws on.
The standard separates display from curation. Like choosing a default search engine, readers select their provider — a social platform’s default, a search company, an open nonprofit.
Minimum requirements every implementation meets: quoted text traces to a verifiable source, off-topic pile-ons are filtered, and the layer stays opt-in.
A layer that depends on volunteers noticing every post will always trail the content it describes. Language models can now draft the layout of a conversation — the perspectives, the framing, the shared ground — from far more material than volunteers could reach, while people still set the bar for what's fair. Readers who distrust a note from an opponent often give a sourced, even-handed summary a fairer hearing.
The web's early plumbing hardened informally, and its accidents became permanent. This layer deserves better: shepherded by a standards community, with implementers and trust-and-safety stewards at the table from the start. If you work on web standards, or build a platform, publication, or browser that could carry the mark — we want to talk.
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