FACTIVE

Inspiration

We think misinformation is one of the biggest challenges for society and will continue to be in the upcoming years. The misinformation campaigns surrounding the elections in the USA and Brazil were already a terrifying trial for our open and democratic societies; The misinformation regarding the COVID vaccine split families and the society. When thinking about deep fakes waiting around the corner we have to acknowledge that this was just the beginning.

Evidently existing fact-checking organizations and existing trusted media are not enough to fight back. We need to give misinformation the attention it deserves.

The solution to these problems is one of the most obvious answers to the question of why society needs blockchain: Let's use the decentralized nature of smart contract platforms like the Internet Computer to secure the independence and freedom of the press. How exactly? With FACTIVE we will lift the trust of Web 2 and Web 3 (social) media platform contents to a level similar to news articles of the well established media -- finally social media will become a reliable source of information, created by the crowd, validated by the crowd, and consumed by the crowd.

With its focus on decentralized social media and its native support for randomness, the Internet Computer provides a unique opportunity for our answer to this challenge.

What it does

Decentralized fact-checking service which can be integrated into existing (social) media platforms.

For details check out our whitepaper.

How we built it

Simulation: Python

Backend: Candid, Rust, Bats for testing

Frontend: Svelte, Typescript, Tailwind

Integrated with the Internet Identity and the IC Ledger.

Challenges we ran into

The initial decisions for the used languages, testing framework and other tools were hard. A close look at the examples at https://github.com/dfinity/examples helped in the end.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Protocol that reliably determines the factual correctness of arbitrary content.
Simulation to validate the important properties of such a decentralized protocol.
Prototype demonstrating that this protocol can be deployed on the Internet Computer.

What we learned

Our background is rather in artificial intelligence and robotics -- it was surprising to us how easily we got started with developing and deploying on the Internet Computer once we decided on the languages and tools :).

What's next for FACTIVE

Complete the protocol implementation for the Internet Computer. Missing features:
- Randomly sample and assign jurors to cases and track the reputation of jurors (currently everyone can vote).
- Implement the more sophisticated reward functions as they are used in the Python prototype.
- Test and implement the upgrade hooks, complete the security checklists.
Integrate with a first (social) media platform partner like DSCVR, Distrikt or Nuance.