Iris

The challenge

According to David Graham, a staff writer at The Atlantic, “[Fake News] It’s not just making people believe false things—a new study suggests it’s also making them less likely to consume or accept information.” With the growing mistrust of information provided by the media, people are shying away from these sources, lowering the power of freedom of speech. Moreover, censorship is still prevalent in several parts of the world. As a team, we wish to tackle these issues and provide a decentralized platform that increases the trust in news sources, while getting rid of fake news, bias, and censorship.

The solution

Our team is developing a blockchain-based decentralized platform where anyone can publish their own articles., and readers can freely access these articles. Upon opening an article, the reader will be presented with which facts presented in the article are factually correct and which facts have been disproven. The process of determining the truthfulness of a statement is done through manual and automated fact-checking. When the algorithm first reads through the article, it highlights statements that need to be fact-checked manually. It then sends these statements to independent fact-checkers, who assess the truthfulness of the claim, explain their decision and list sources that agree or contradict with the highlighted statement.