The extreme growth and adoption of Social Media, in combination with their poor governance 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 and lack resilience towards news falsification methods. 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.
Serious concerns about the growing fake news problem have been raised in the EU Parliament, whereas various organizations (including commercial vendors) are being confronted with a mass of fake news and are taking steps to reduce disinformation being spread and re-posted in the web. The classification of disinformation and misinformation is challenging due to its vague definition and established human rights related to freedom of speech. Even trusted sources, such as news agencies, are not easily to verified and in practice, news veracity relies upon implicit editorial trust.
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.
In view of the above, the SocialTruth objectives are to:
Obj-1: Develop a distributed content verification solution with a complex-free Digital Companion for online credibility verification of digital content found on web and social media.
Obj-2: Compose a digital content analytics and verification ecosystem with support for text, image and video, open to third-party service providers.
Obj-3: Leverage blockchain technologies to establish distributed reputation and trust in digital content sharing.
Obj-4: Deploy a distributed and thoroughly validated architecture (TRL-7) for the delivery of SocialTruth credibility evaluation services.
Obj-5: Test and evaluate the SocialTruth architecture and services in real-life use cases with the close involvement of end-users.
Obj-6: Introduce innovative business models for news, web and social media stakeholders, and provide support to the EU strategic agendas and policies.
