User-oriented, secure, trustful & decentralised social media

Project Information

EUNOMIA

Grant agreement ID: 825171

DOI

10.3030/825171

Project closed

EC signature date 26 November 2018

Start date 1 December 2018

End date 30 November 2021

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 2 938 283,37

EU contribution

€ 2 454 799,65

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITY OF GREENWICH
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - EUNOMIA (User-oriented, secure, trustful & decentralised social media)

Reporting period: 2020-06-01 to 2021-11-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

EUNOMIA operates in a rapidly changing social media landscape, where information trustworthiness has become a challenge of primary importance for its users. Its unique direction is that it places the user at the centre of the decision making process. It does not tell a user what to believe, but supports the user in determining themselves what they consider trustworthy. Provided in open-source format, EUNOMIA is the first social media platform that places trust over likes, assisting its users in determining whether the information shared through it is trustworthy. Uniquely, it achieves this in a fully decentralised and federated manner that addresses the threat of an entity manipulating the trustworthiness of information displayed to the users. It addressed three key challenges:
• Which social media user is the original source of a piece of information?
• How this information has spread and/or been modified in an information cascade?
• and how likely it is to be trustworthy?

The EUNOMIA project successfully completed all its objectives: (1) Identified EUNOMIA’s technical, user, legal and ethical requirements for a diverse range of social media use cases; (2) Designed and developed the decentralised technological infrastructure required to support the operation of EUNOMIA’s trustworthiness verification and scoring technologies; (3) Designed and developed the EUNOMIA trustworthiness verification and scoring technologies; (4) Integrated the technologies developed into the complete EUNOMIA platform and digital companion; (5) Evaluated EUNOMIA in relevant environments; (6) Disseminated the project’s results, developed exploitation plan and involved several communities with the purpose to progress from early adopters to a post-project sustainable large-scale user base.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

From its very beginning, EUNOMIA’s researchers were provided with four overarching expectations set at its kick-off meeting: (a) open and decentralized, (b) intermediary-free, (c) privacy-preserving, and (d) positive-first. These expectations served as the guiding principles for the design, development, integration and evaluation of the solution.
Following the project’s first review, we simplified development by tailoring to Mastodon. We focused on what improved adoption, UX or existing USPs. We strengthened the provenance tracking, decentralisation, and mobile app (both iOS and Android). The mobile app was significant because the vast majority of people use social media are almost exclusively accessing such services on mobile devices. The project’s second review confirmed the direction that we followed and helped guide the implementation of successful pilots.
Thanks to its integration with Mastodon, EUNOMIA is offered as a standalone social media environment, the only one of its kind that supports its users in assessing the trustworthiness of what is shared through it. In this way, it naturally reduces the spread of misinformation at the source. At the same time, it is the only solution that can technologically guarantee that the information it displays about each post is up to date and has not been modified by a security breach or a dishonest administrator. Through a number of pilots and demonstration environments, we presented EUNOMIA frequently and widely to external stakeholders, working groups and communities. Public pilots served as showrooms for other communities, with different focus, from communities of common interests to commercial benefit for online publishers, and education offerings for universities and training organisations.
A shared exploitation strategy was agreed centered around the formation of a foundation. EUNOMIA is open-source but this does not mean easy to deploy and maintain. This is where the foundation comes in to take on the deployment and maintenance of instances on behalf of subscribers, as well as for leading the governance of the EUNOMIA network and supporting the community of open-source developers.
The project’s dissemination activities were very ambitious from the beginning. We were able to meet or exceed most of the targets that we set ourselves. The website underwent several redesigns, leading to its current content-heavy approach, with several videos produced, infographics and a very active blog.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

EUNOMIA progresses beyond the state of the art across several dimensions. As a complete offering, it is the first information trustworthiness technical solution that adopts a fully decentralised architecture. The primary benefit of this is that it contributes against the accumulation of power to any intermediary and further strengthens the users’ privacy protection. It is also the first toolkit that empowers the user to take control of the misinformation challenge by being provided with information that is otherwise unavailable to them, as well as a means to express their assessment of a post's trustworthiness thus protecting their network too.
EUNOMIA progresses the identification of social media information cascades beyond the state of the art that is based only on the posts that have been directly re-shared. Instead, it dynamically detects cascades based on the natural textual and paraphrase similarity of posts. This allows to identify posts that have modified the original information's content. Regarding subjectivity analysis, paraphrase identification and sentence embeddings, we have fine-tuned transformer-based natural language understanding models to surpass the performance of baseline deep learning. Uniquely, the integrity of the fully decentralized P2P architecture is protected by an additional blockchain infrastructure.
Its personalised digital nudging is also the first of its kind, whereby different users can set their own preferences as to when and how often to be digitally nudged to pay more attention to a post in relation to its trustworthiness.
The EUNOMIA information cascade was extended by being the first to include image similarity into the information cascade mechanism. We also progressed beyond state of the art on the decentralized storage with a cryptographically enforced decentralized access control mechanism on top of IPFS.

Beyond the technical progress described, the focus was on integration and community building, pilots, dissemination, innovation and exploitation activities. EUNOMIA was deployed in 7 instances and tested in pilots with a total of 697 users. Its integration was extended to the real environment of the largest social journalism platform, Blasting News, including all its English-speaking channels.
As intended from the beginning, its source code was published online. Importantly, EUNOMIA instances can be federated with non-EUNOMIA instances ensuring that their tools can only access data from EUNOMIA instances.
Its dissemination highlights include 1,226 social media posts and 1,099 followers across 6 platforms, as well as several webinars, infographics, cartoons and 13 videos produced, in addition to scientific publications and special issues/sessions in the flagship IEEE journal IT Professional, ACM CHI and IEEE Globecom.

In terms of impact, EUNOMIA is aiming at: Increased trust and value for Social Media and Media; Promoting open, decentralized and federated Social Media platforms; Contributing towards citizen participation; Contributing towards media literacy through information hygiene; Contributing towards trust and credibility within European society.

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