SocialTruth · Open Distributed Digital Content Verification for Hyper-connected Sociality

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.