ARTICONF · smART socIal media eCOsytstem in a blockchaiN Federated environment

Social media platforms are key technologies for next generation connectivity. Social media platforms have the potential to shape and mobilise patterns of communication, practices of exchange and business, creation, learning and knowledge acquisition. Typically, social media are centralised platforms with a single proprietary organisation controlling the network. This poses critical issues of trust and governance over created and propagated content. This is particularly problematic when data breaches are a regular phenomenon at the hands of centralised intermediaries. To address this, we need innovative solutions at the user level (i.e. that of consumers, prosumers, and businesses) and at the level of the underlying social media environment. This will facilitate global reach, improved trust, and decentralised control and ownership. ARTICONF researches and develops a novel set of trustworthy, resilient, and globally sustainable decentralised social media services. ARTICONF addresses issues of trust, time-criticality and democratisation for a new generation of federated infrastructure, to fulfil the privacy, robustness, and autonomy related promises that proprietary social media platforms have failed to deliver so far. Namely, its goals are to: (1) simplify the creation of open and agile social media ecosystem with trusted participation using a two stage permissioned blockchain; (2) automatically detect interest groups and communities using graph anonymization techniques for decentralised and tokenized decision-making and reasoning; (3) elastically autoscale time-critical social media applications through an adaptive orchestrated Cloud edge-based infrastructure meeting application runtime requirements; and (4) enhance monetary inclusion in collaborative models through cognition and knowledge supply chains.