I am not really sure how it could be faked. The fake assurance, in order to work, must be connected to you.
By default you could choose not to trust. If you don't trust random strangers it's OK. So I don't see how it would damage someone's reputation worse than today.
It would potentially only add trust. Arguably, today we have bots because we have no other option than to trust without justification. With the public social graph, the trust above the baseline would be justifiable.
So what happens when people are paid or otherwise incentivised to 'trust'?
This model was used in the beginning of the web, where links to your site from a well trusted website would increase the score and therefore SEO of your own site. This very quickly turned into a business of people selling hidden paid site links, and evolved into the paid editorial model we see on every news site today.
Hm, that's an interesting point. But wasn't problem of that model that the social graph (links) were not really public, but rather hidden within a search engine such as Google? Maybe if they are public the problem would be mitigated.
By default you could choose not to trust. If you don't trust random strangers it's OK. So I don't see how it would damage someone's reputation worse than today.
It would potentially only add trust. Arguably, today we have bots because we have no other option than to trust without justification. With the public social graph, the trust above the baseline would be justifiable.