Data Cooperatives for Trusted News Sharing in Social Media

Abstract

The voluntary gathering and pooling of personal data by individuals via legal fiduciaries called data cooperatives is gaining a lot of attention as an approach to secure data management. Data cooperatives and blockchain are an excellent combination since they share fundamental features like decentralization and democratic design. In this paper, we leverage the power of blockchain to design a trusted news-sharing system for social media. We prove our concept by implementing a consumer news coop network on the Ethereum blockchain where members can voluntarily pool news information about their neighborhood for their benefit and also receive incentives in the form of an improved reputation for sharing credible news stories. We enforce honest behavior among the participants by implementing a trust and reputation scheme based on EigenTrust. Our results show that the blockchain approach to implementing a data cooperative is efficient with respect to memory consumption, scalability, and cost while also providing improved trust among participants. Furthermore, the reputation mechanism is effective in ensuring that malicious participants are severely penalized and removed from the system, while honest participants are rewarded. This approach can be used in a much bigger setup like Twitter so that the credibility of a shared post can be verified by a consensus before being shared on the network, thereby mitigating the spread of misinformation.