As per the reports, Adblock Plus developer eyeo GmbH will use blockchain technology in its browser extension Trusted News.
Eyeo initiated Trusted News in beta, and it is currently accessible only on Chrome. The company’s project website claims that the browser add-on labels false news media while marking reliable sources and news. Once users add the extension to their browser, it displays a small window with a short description of the news sources using labels like “trustworthy,” “unknown,” “clickbait,” or “satire.”
The system assembles data from different sources, such as PolitiFact, Snopes, Wikipedia, and Zimdars’ List, to determine news ratings. The extension works with the MetaCert protocol, which exercises an anti-fraud URL registry to sustain the database for the project. As per the plans, the database will ultimately be migrated to the Ethereum blockchain. Eyeo also intends to issue MetaCert tokens to track rewards and to evade the risk of bad actors maneuvering or ruining data.
Trusted News will also have an option in which users can give feedback on certain ratings, and even argue if they disagree with a certain categorization. Ben Williams, Eyeo’s director of ecosystems said:
“They can say ‘hey I don’t feel like this site should be listed as biased because of whatever’. And we’re going to use that feedback to make the product better. And then the next step is to decouple that from any server, and from any third party, and give it directly to the blockchain. So that feedback can live on its own in that place and so that good feedback can be prized and rewarded by users and people who are providing lousy feedback won’t be. So that is the next step.”
Note that Eyeo is not the first company to express concern about fighting fake news using blockchain technology. In March 2017, Google declared that it will pay special attention to the issue of trustworthy news and spend $300 million to generate the Google News Initiative platform. In November 2017, Facebook announced the formation of trust indicators attached to articles on the social media platform.
