Crowd Sourcing and Blockchain-Based Incentive Mechanism to Combat Fake News

Abstract

With advancing technology, social media sites have become narratives for news surfacing the digital world. Social media users generally have no qualm for forwarding whatever comes their way. The flexibility of social media platforms offers no way to prove the credibility of a shared piece of information. The authenticity of the news and maintaining netiquette over social media sites have become precedence areas. This has challenged the technology in maintaining the ethics and objectivity of journalism. This chapter presents a shared, decentralized framework that implements an alternate vision to the customary way people share information. In particular, we provide an innovative blockchain and crowd sourcing-based framework for demonstrating the provenance of news surfacing through digital media. Under this platform, the truth is sourced from the crowd, stored, and consequently transformed into a real-time interface. Moreover, using the immutable feature of blockchain, all users are made accountable and valued based on their reputation. Further, nodes are provided with incentives for their rightful behavior and are penalized for their malicious actions. Thus, we aim to offer a much-needed layer for secure, reliable information exchange in our present-day social media infrastructure that does not rely on a single source of truth. IntroductionReading and watching the news has been an important way for individuals to keep themselves informed about the world and current affairs. Traditionally newspapers, radio, and television were the medium through which people consumed information.