ARTICONF decentralized social media platform for democratic crowd journalism

Abstract

Media production and consumption behaviors are changing in response to new technologies and demands, giving birth to a new generation of social applications. Among them, crowd journalism represents a novel way of constructing democratic and trustworthy news relying on ordinary citizens arriving at breaking news locations and capturing relevant videos using their smartphones. The ARTICONF project as reported by Prodan (Euro-Par 2019: parallel processing workshops, Springer, 2019) proposes a trustworthy, resilient, and globally sustainable toolset for developing decentralized applications (DApps) to address this need. Its goal is to overcome the privacy, trust, and autonomy-related concerns associated with proprietary social media platforms overflowed by fake news. Leveraging the ARTICONF tools, we introduce a new DApp for crowd journalism called MOGPlay. MOGPlay collects and manages audiovisual content generated by citizens and provides a secure blockchain platform that rewards all stakeholders involved in professional news production. Besides live streaming, MOGPlay offers a marketplace for audiovisual content trading among citizens and free journalists with an internal token ecosystem. We discuss the functionality and implementation of the MOGPlay DApp and illustrate four pilot crowd journalism live scenarios that validate the prototype.