HELIOS CJ app: The decentralization of the citizen journalism

Abstract

The decentralization of Social Media applications has gained importance in the last years. In this direction, the HELIOS project has been proposed in order to provide a decentralized platform for social applications. Among these several social applications, the Journalism field is considered an important use case. The main problem which needs to be addressed is preventing the spread of fake news and ensuring the authenticity of the literature for end readers. Furthermore, with the rise of Citizen Journalism, the way of how people can participate to share information is changed. In this paper, we present the HELIOS Citizen Journalism App (CJ) developed in the context of the HELIOS project. The CJ App allows users to contribute content anonymously, based on blockchain technology. After publishing the content via the app, the content is available to publishers for further distribution, on a decentralized P2P and IPFS-based network storage. Furthermore, by making a donation for particular content, the CJ also receives remuneration. In this paper, we show the architecture of the App by describing its components and how it works.