Bias-Resistant Social News Aggregator Based on Blockchain

TL;DR

This paper presents a blockchain-based social news aggregator that uses a graph of relations between news items to reduce bias and fake news, with an incentive system encouraging honest participation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel graph-based voting method on news relations and a blockchain-enabled incentive layer to promote honest behavior and mitigate bias in social news aggregation.

Findings

Mitigates bias by using relation-based votes instead of direct news votes.

Incentive layer encourages honest user behavior and deters fraud.

Protocol enables fraud proof verification on the blockchain.

Abstract

In today's world, social networks have become one of the primary sources for creation and propagation of news. Social news aggregators are one of the actors in this area in which users post news items and use positive or negative votes to indicate their preference toward a news item. News items will be ordered and displayed according to their aggregated votes. This approach suffers from several problems raging from being prone to the dominance of the majority to difficulty in discerning between correct and fake news, and lack of incentive for honest behaviors. In this paper, we propose a graph-based news aggregator in which instead of voting on the news items, users submit their votes on the relations between pairs of news items. More precisely, if a user believes two news items support each other, he will submit a positive vote on the link between the two items, and if he believes that two news items undermine each other, he will submit a negative vote on the corresponding link. This approach has mainly two desirable features: (1) mitigating the effect of personal preferences on voting, (2) connection of new items to endorsing and disputing evidence. This approach helps the newsreaders to understand different aspects of a news item better. We also introduce an incentive layer that uses blockchain as a distributed transparent manager to encourages users to behave honestly and abstain from adversary behaviors. The incentive layer takes into account that users can have different viewpoints toward news, enabling users from a wide range of viewpoints to contribute to the network and benefit from its rewards. In addition, we introduce a protocol that enables us to prove fraud in computations of the incentive layer model on the blockchain. Ultimately, we will analyze the fraud proof protocol and examine our incentive layer on a wide range of synthesized datasets.