SocialTruth (Open Distributed Digital Content Verification for Hyper-connected Sociality) is a research project coordinated by the Institute of Communications and Computer Systems (ICCS) that was funded by the European Commission under the H2020 framework programme with Grant Agreement no. 825477.
SocialTruth’s aims to create an open, democratic, pluralistic and distributed ecosystem that allows easy access to various verification services (both internal and third-party), ensuring scalability and establishing trust in a completely decentralised environment.
Social networks, media and web platforms are the standard way in how our societies operate for the purposes of communication, information exchange, conducting business, co-creation, learning and knowledge acquisition. However, this extreme growth and adoption of Social Media, in combination with their poor governance and the lack of quality control over the digital content being published and shared, has led information veracity to a continuous deterioration.
SocialTruth tackles this challenge and provides an innovative and distributed way to achieve both content and author credibility verification and detection of fake news. In this way, it contributes to increase trust in and reliability of Social Media. SocialTruth solution can be used to detect fake news by both professionals (i.e. journalists) and individuals (daily social media users), allowing for improved governance and information veracity in Social Media.
In particular, SocialTruth solution presents the following features:
- Open ecosystem with standard interfaces and no vendor lock-in, favouring pluralism and the deployment of reusable, interoperable and interchangeable verification services;
- Powered by blockchain technology, for distributed reputation and trust, enhanced security and auditability, with no intermediaries and central authorities;
- Expert meta-verification engines with open design that can intelligently fuse multiple verification results;
- Lifelong Learning Machines that constantly accumulate experience and learn new paradigms of fake news;
- Digital Companion ensuring convenient access to both professional and individual users.
SocialTruth consortium consists of eleven partners from EU member states, gathering multiple expertise and knowledge, including IT and cybersecurity companies, research centres, no profit associations and consulting firms.
Documentation
SocialTruth Project Partners
