TRUSTD: Combat Fake Content using Blockchain and Collective Signature Technologies

TL;DR

TRUSTD is a blockchain-based ecosystem designed to combat fake content by enabling community-backed verification and collective signatures, enhancing content credibility and user trust.

Contribution

The paper introduces TRUSTD, a novel blockchain and collective signature system that supports community verification of digital content to fight misinformation.

Findings

Proposes a blockchain framework for content verification

Enables collective signatures for community-backed trust

Aims to improve credibility assessment of digital content

Abstract

The growing trend of sharing news/contents, through social media platforms and the World Wide Web has been seen to impact our perception of the truth, altering our views about politics, economics, relationships, needs and wants. This is because of the growing spread of misinformation and disinformation intentionally or unintentionally by individuals and organizations. This trend has grave political, social, ethical, and privacy implications for society due to 1) the rapid developments in the field of Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) algorithms in creating realistic-looking yet fake digital content (such as text, images, and videos), 2) the ability to customize the content feeds and to create a polarized so-called "filter-bubbles" leveraging the availability of the big-data. Therefore, there is an ethical need to combat the flow of fake content. This paper attempts to resolve some of the aspects of this combat by presenting a high-level overview of TRUSTD, a blockchain and collective signature-based ecosystem to help content creators in getting their content backed by the community, and to help users judge on the credibility and correctness of these contents.