Research pick: P2P blockchain to combat fake news - "Combating fake news in social networks through the active participation of users: the approach of EUNOMIA project"

Could users of social media provide the answer to combating fake news? That’s the question researchers from Greece hope to answer in their paper published in the International Journal of Electronic Governance.

Fake news has become a serious problem, growing in parallel with the expansion of the world of social media. The term euphemistically refers ton disinformation, misinformation, and downright lies shared online usually with a hidden political agenda. That agenda might be aimed at nudging voters to an alternative conclusion about their political persuasion, it might push them to choose a potentially harmful medical option that is not based on evidence, it might even persuade them to buy a product or service offered by one business instead of another.

The possibilities for exploiting fake news for marketers, politicians, and malicious third parties are possibly limitless given the power and speed with which social media networks can spread information and trigger viral sharing.

Panagiotis Monachelis, Lazaros Toumanidis, Panagiotis Kasnesis, and Charalampos Patrikakis of the University of West Attica, discuss a proposal of the European Union’s EUNOMIA project. In this project social media users are encouraged to participate in the evaluation of information being shared online. The system discussed brings together the concepts of peer-to-peer networking (commonly associated with distributed file sharing) and blockchain technology (usually associated with digital currencies, “crypto”, and non-fungible tokens, NFTs).

EUNOMIA is powered by an alternative social media protocol and system known as Mastodon, which allows anyone to create and build their own social media network with rules and regulations they set. There are innumerable instances of Mastodon running across the globe now. Ostensibly, any of them might be directly connected to any other, but there is always the option of controlling membership and precluding connectivity.

For the time being, they exist well outside the world of the well-known, proprietary social media sites and apps. As such, they are in many ways protected from the controlling algorithms and advertising systems of those sites. Moreover, given that they are distributed and available to anyone to setup and run, there is in one sense nothing for a commercial concern to make its fiscal prey. This can so easily happen with any of those proprietary sites, which are wholly at the whim of business concerns despite their stated ethos, whereas Mastodon sites and communities are more akin to the communal, rather than the commercial, ethic of the modern internet.

Monachelis, P., Toumanidis, L., Kasnesis, P. and Patrikakis, C. (2022) ‘Combating fake news in social networks through the active participation of users: the approach of EUNOMIA project’, Int. J. Electronic Governance, Vol. 14, Nos. 1/2, pp.131–144.