Ricerc@Sapienza

News, in its purest sense, is meant to convey truthful, unbiased, and informative facts about issues affecting the world. While technologies offer new and easy ways, notably through social media, to disseminate information on a large scale, they can also be used as powerful echo chambers for disinformation campaigns.

Disinformation, includes all forms of "false, inaccurate, or misleading information presented and promoted to intentionally cause public harm or for profit" [4] and erodes trust in institutions and media, hampering the ability of citizens to take informed decisions.

Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), of which a notable example is blockchain, support decentralized methods for consensus reaching as well as storing and securing transactions and other data with no central intermediaries.
The blockchain, firstly used as public ledger for the Bitcoin cryptocurrency [1] is a quite novel technology, essentially consisting in a replicated database distributed among nodes belonging to different parties. Recently, it has gained a great momentum for its fascinating properties (e.g., distributed consensus, data integrity, non-repudiation).

Although insofar this technology has mainly been used to develop financial applications, the above reasons it has a strong potential for revolutionary innovations that can be beneficial for the society. 

The purpose of this research is devising a blockchain-based infrastructure to enable the assessment of news trustworthiness, with the ultimate goal of fighting online disinformation spread.

It offers public endpoint where users can report news resources, that will undergo a combination of automatic preprocessing and human-curated fact-checking, the latter being performed by a network of trusted members belonging to accredited companies and resulting in a trustworthiness score that will be stored indefinitely along with the news metadata, as a transaction of the public ledger managed by a publicly accessible blockchain.