Background
Our project aims to track and fight fake news. We want to provide a tool for the public that allows in an easy way to check if/when/how a news item has been edited.
We plan to develop and execute an experiment where we follow two news websites in the Netherlands. Whereas one of the news websites is owned and operated by the national news agency and the other a small independent website that also publishes news.
Every news article and the subsequent change to the news article will be saved into our system and certified with a blockchain, the results are available through a website. This way over the course of a couple of weeks and months we can establish what, how and in which way fake news affects social media, where fake news originates and how it impacts general opinion on social networks.
The first MVP will consist of a website (frontend) and scraper (background) that will track two national news sites (sources) in The Netherlands. Users can paste the URL of a news article on the site and see the changes that were made to that article. If the URL is not found then a new entry will be added and tracked.
The data aquired by our scraper is public domain.
We do not gather personal information neither from users or from the sources.
Our software runs mostly in background to find and collect data from the sources and doesn’t need a mobile app or a complex front end, this is why we plan to use a minimal interface in a website to allow the public to search and compare data from our archive.
If the experiment is proven successful, meaning it has been proven to have added value to reduce or combat fakenews, we plan to develop this functionality into an open source plugin that can be used by individuals and (government and civilliberity) organizations to track sites and in that way add to the general integrity of news and journalism.
Aletheia
In short Aletheia aims to help fight fake news by making changes and deletions in posted news articles visible for everyone to see. Because there is a lack of tools to audit news articles made, we decided to develop a solution to help organizations, individuals and institutions audit news sites and their articles.
With our MVP and subsequent pilot we plan to use Aletheia on two major news sites in the Netherlands.
In the final stage we will not only post our conclusions but also give open data access to all gathered data and research for peer-review and (re)use. Our aim is to make Aletheia not only open source but also easy to implement and use for both individuals and organizations.
The external oversight on the development process and pilot will be done by Astrid Oosenbrug as chairperson of the Open Source & Government Foundation. Astrid is also a former member of Dutch parliament for the social democrats and she has extensive experience in the IT sector.
Blockchain and Ledger technologies
Credibility and auditability are in our opinion just as important as trust, especially in journalism. Therefore the first two points are the most important focal points for us when combating fake news.
When something is credible and it is auditable it leads to trust. We will make use of existing and trusted European blockchain and ledger technologies to confirm that the data is untampered with.