Finally a crowd-sourced Internet Fact Filter is here ! ~TruStory

The Internet has come a long way to the extent that it profoundly influences our way of life, our culture, our social behavior and it even reflects the ethical behavior of human society!. Ten years back most of us could not think of the idea that internet memes could replace editorial cartoons in daily newspapers, magazines, and other print media but that has really happened now. In our digital world of instant messages and social media, memes are the new word for our source of humor. Memes, which has become a part of our digital life has come as trolls without us paying real attention to it. Even the new internet slang words like “trolls” have come into our lives as part of this evolution happening on the internet. Now if you observe all the popular aspects on the internet today, they have all originated from somewhere in some forms and over the course of time has taken its present state. There is always a seed, to begin with. TruStory is one such seed for the fact-checked internet of the future.

TruStory is a new blockchain-based startup based in LA, USA. They bring an innovative idea of crowd-sourced fact-checking of internet data. At first, they will focus on fact-checking only crypto related data on the internet, but eventually plans to expand to anything and everything which can be fact checked on the internet!

The Fake News Problem

When the internet explosion happened and still happening in some parts of the world it gave greater collective power to human beings. As the internet is less censored and less scrutinized it soon started reflecting all kinds of human behavioral aspects including the human psychology of spreading wrong information. This effect got progressed to the next level with the growing popularity of social media on the internet. Essentially every human being is now given the power of a media house and can propagate any kind of information using these social media and even do that hiding their own real identity. This is a TED talk which I listened recently where it mentions about the technology which can make fake videos of real people talking. Now that is even worse than propagating fake information with textual data alone!.

Since after the revelation of social media meddling with US Presidential election in 2016, there has been a lot of pressure on social media to reassess their processes and algorithms to prevent fake media from propagating and the echo chamber effect most of these centralized social media platforms promote. They are working on solutions for this but will be really challenging for them to implement something effective even with AI or machine learning since to identify the fact quotient of real-world data still requires the work of humans to bring all pieces of evidence and arguments of a fact to the table.

Fact checking is getting really fired up these days. There are websites already doing fact-checking media news like the ones below, to list a few.

PolitiFact: This one does fact checking on US Political news

Snopes: Snopes started as a site doing fact-checking on urban legends, common misconceptions, myths etc but now got expanded to fact-checking any viral misinformation on the internet

FactCheck.org: Not only is FactCheck.org a fact-checking website with an established history of journalistic rigor, but it is also one of the partners Facebook has recruited to combat viral fake news.

But all of these fact-checking sites even though work independent and unbiased they all lack the Power of Crowd. The Internet is designed for the global audience even though there are some geographic restrictions and power centers that can influence more control over the internet. The global audience is the best bet when it comes to fact-checking the Internet. This is where TruStory has the most innovative business model for fact-checking.

Some of the key features of TruStory

Crowdsourced fact-checking: TruStory picked up the most ideal model for Fact-checking, which is, promoting the network effect of the crowd to arrive at the truth of an internet claim. I think this is far better than any fact-checking closed entity deciding on the truth of an internet claim by their private means.

Blockchain consensus protocol: TruStory uses blockchain consensus mechanism to arrive at a consensus on decision making on the distributed network. To put it in simple terms, in order to reach agreement on the final truth of a claim by the network participants some form of consensus mechanism is required. TruStory runs on Cosmos blockchain network which can be called a third generation blockchain or interoperability blockchain. A tweet rundown from TruStory explains why cosmos can be better than second generation blockchain networks like Ethereum. Here is the TruStory tweet:

Cosmos uses Tendermint as the consensus engine which uses a form of Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm based on Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant (PBFT) algorithm.

Tokenized incentive and disincentive system: TruStory uses a robust form of token economics to incentivize and disincentivize the staked tokens of network participants used to challenge or back the internet claims created on TruStory. Any participant in TruStory network can create a claim, as well as back or challenge the claim by staking their tokens and providing their arguments and evidence. The TruStory protocol defines the rules for what happens when you lock your stake by challenging/backing it. A voting game is played if a story reaches a challenging threshold, and the outcome is determined by the weighted vote of the participants. If you’re right, you get back your stake and earn reputation. If you’re wrong, you lose your stake and don’t earn the reputation.

There is more to this!! I just outlined the bare-bones now. TruStory is still in development. So once the app is available I would post more details on how it all works in TruStory!.

Why TruStory uses blockchain?

The blockchain and crypto hype is over!. Nobody plans to use the blockchain tech for pizza delivery now and ICO’s are being relooked upon for all the flaws it had. The blockchain tech itself is stepping into the third generation with a focus on more user adoption. For me, I feel TruStory is an apt use case for blockchain tech. The truth of an objective data can be narrowed down to a smaller subset which is either true or false based on pieces of evidence and TruStory intends to falsify only objective data and not opinions and subjective data. Since the data can only be aligned to be either true or false it becomes a perfect use case to crowd-source and put the network effect into play to reach a consensus on it. Unlike in Steemit blog site where there is no deterministic way to identify the value of a blog other than personal preference and hence allowing the crowd to decide the value may sometimes lead to attempts to influence the system using vote bots etc. In the case of TruStory, the crowd can see all the evidence and arguments presented for a fact and hence can align to the true side which is very obvious. Of course, the consensus mechanism needs to be robust as well which in TruStory’s case is true with Tendermint. So with the immutability aspect of blockchain which preserves fact-checked data of the internet and the robust consensus mechanism using social token economics inherent to a blockchain network TruStory makes one of the best use cases for blockchain tech adoption.

Get on to the TruStory boat now and it is free!

You can actually get a feel of what TruStory is making and become part of TruStory community for free! Just click on the link here and submit your details.

Right now TruStory is a bit nerdy and deals only with all kinds of information related to crypto space. But you don’t really need to be a crypto nerd or crypto investor or blockchain developer to be part of TruStory. Anyone who is fed up of the tons of fake media news, information, biased data on the internet and really interested in contributing to a much better fact-checked internet and at the same time do not hate to know more about the crypto space are welcome to join here. I have been part of this community for some time and I will have to admit that this is one place you would like to get associated to know every happening in the crypto world and as well get a chance to talk to industry experts on AMA sessions along with tons of learning on weekly study sessions, all for free! Please check out the TruStory discourse forum and word from the CEO Preethi Kasireddy here

Consider this as ocean cleaning! You just need to show your willingness to volunteer ocean cleaning for a better ocean with more robust life and a better planet! In TruStory, you do this cleaning for our own dear Internet!

Credits: Preethi Kasireddy for her valuable inputs.