Project description
Preventing the spread of false information online
Unreliable and inaccurate information of all kinds can spread rapidly online, particularly on social media networks. This makes it increasingly difficult, yet necessary, to verify information. Currently, verification is undertaken by centralised authorities, but this is not enough. The EU-funded project SocialTruth focuses on the creation of an open, democratic, pluralistic and distributed ecosystem that allows easy access to various verification services (both internal and third-party). By using blockchain technology, the aim is to ensure scalability and trust in a completely decentralised environment. The idea is to prevent the spread of misinformation by empowering individual users to verify information within their browsers. The solution also supports journalists as well as certified fact-checkers, to provide annotations on trustworthiness of news.
Objective
The extreme growth and adoption of Social Media, in combination with their poor governance and the lack of quality control over the digital content being published and shared, has led information veracity to a continuous deterioration. Current approaches entrust content verification to a single centralised authority, lack resilience towards attempts to successfully “game” verification checks, and make content verification difficult to access and use. In response, SocialTruth’s ambition is to create an open, democratic, pluralistic and distributed ecosystem that allows easy access to various verification services (both internal and third-party), ensuring scalability and establishing trust in a completely decentralized environment. The distinctive advantages are: a) avoidance of vendor lock-in through access to configurable combinations of various content analytics and verification services (with support for text, image and video content) via standard Application Programming Interfaces; b) distributed trust and reputation establishment powered by blockchain technology, ensuring immutability and auditability, revealing information cascades and empowering an information veracity observatory; c) integration of lifelong learning approach for detection of new paradigms of fake news; d) easy interaction through a Digital Companion that allows convenient everyday access of individual users to verification services from within their browsers. SocialTruth will benefit: a) Individual users to verify the validity of Social Media content and prevent misinformation spread; b) Media organisations, content authors and journalists to boost their investigative capabilities by enabling improved cross-checking of various multimedia information sources; c) Search engines, Social Media platforms and e-advertising networks to improve information veracity and contribute into a more sustainable and quality-oriented web and social media ecosystem.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
IA - Innovation actionCoordinator
106 82 ATHINA
Greece