BlockNews

Inspiration

We hear and watch so much news daily but don’t know which is fake and which authentic. If we go to find out the truth that who is aware of the correctness of the news, we will find a handful. This negligence of finding the news's correctness leads to the media's hamper and, eventually, the audiences' brains. Every day thousands of news are posted on social media spreading misinformation, and most of the people blindly follow them without even intervening in the process and knowing the fact behind the news. This is a major issue that needs to be solved, and people should see the correctness of the information spreading daily on social media.

To solve this problem we came across an idea that we named BlockNews and built a Decentralised web application on it.

The problem it solves

The issues that are occurring in the news media that BlockNews solve:

Fake News is created on an Industrial scale to spread virally. -Current infrastructure to detect fake news is unscalable, slow, and sometimes even biased.
People are not interested in searching for the truth behind the information.
Some data may be faked to get the attention of the targeted audiences.
People blindly follow the fact displayed to them, which leads to chaotic situations.

What it does

BlockNews is a Decentralised web application that allows users to prove a piece of news is fake or original and thus helps in reducing the spread of misinformation. It works on the concept of 'wisdom of the crowd' and employs a motivational approach of 'carrot and stick' to fact-check. To Fact check a news tweet anyone on Twitter needs to just retweet the news tweet with a given #hashtag(in the tweet), and after that, volunteers from anywhere over the world can participate in the fact-checking process to research this piece of news and after it is completed they can stake some amount of MATIC against their opinion to prove their inclination towards their decision on the particular news. After the voting ends the result is calculated on the basis of the votes of the participants and then the stakes of the losing party are distributed among the proper researchers in the ratio of their stakes locked.

How we built it

Figma: We have used Figma to scale our idea into a scalable high-fidelity prototype from a low-fidelity prototype.
User Interface: We have used technologies like React and styling like tailwindcss to scale the prototype to the production level and provide our users with a medium to interact without blockchain nodes easily.
Solidity: We have used Solidity to write the Smart-contract of the whole process occurring in the web application and return decisions from it.
Gelato Ops: We have used Gelato Ops for Smart Contract automation and executions. The calculation of the result after a room expiry and the stakes distribution is achieved using Gelato.
Server: We have also used databases like MongoDB and a well-integrated server using NodeJS and ExpressJS to store our tweets and their information.
Twitter Bot: It is used to fetch the particular #hashtag from Twitter to our servers.

Challenges we ran into

We faced problems keeping track of the fetched tweets from Twitter and rendering them in the web application.
We faced issues in rendering Blockchain data to the frontend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we can solve such real-world issues, which will bring changes to society.
We are proud that we are able to overcome the challenges faced in the whole process and create interactive web applications for our idea.

What we learned

We learned how to better collaborate with other developers and convert an idea into a web application.
We learned various new technologies and implemented them simultaneously.

What's next for BlockNews

Add a Reputation Score to point the user researching capability.
Integrating various social media APIs like Facebook and WhatsaApp.
Converting it into a third-party API for global use by Social Media Companies.