The beginning of the 21st century brought about an exciting change in the internet. It was the freedom of blogging to express opinions and views and share information. The whole process was interesting as it was a step in a different direction from the traditional legacy media.
For once, anyone with access to the internet could write something and share—Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and similar platforms became a voice for the general public.
A decade later, it turns out that the new media wasn't any different, as users still had no control.
Most of the platforms were still plagued, belonging to specific corporations with a centralized structure, and control of social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook over user data (Cough* Cambridge Analytica), and more…
The condition of the legacy and new media is pitiful, and people have started to distrust them looking for an alternative that gives freedom and is decentralized. So, how can decentralized media build a fairer stage?
Before you find the answer, let's look at current media problems and the potential technologies that solve them.
Problems
Censorship
The usual definition of censorship is suppressing information in the form of words, images, or ideas that are offensive, obscene, or a threat. One might think it's necessary and keeps unsocial elements in check. And you wouldn't be wrong.
However, stifling dissent and diversity through censorship is a problem.
In 2021,
In 2020,
Incidents like these show how vulnerable and powerless people are with someone else in control and that any fact you state is just a few clicks away from being censored.
Bias
Bias is another largely prevalent problem in today's media. We have seen both online and electronic media leaning towards one side. Fox News, for example, has been observed to run news in favor of the Republicans.
The media often overlooks high-quality content to favor shallow sensationalism to drive engagement. Filtering is vital to weed out irrelevant and harmful content, but it is too narrow and results in a Filter Bubble.
Facebook, Twitter, and Google's algorithm selectively predict a user's interest based on their previous clicks, search history, and location.
This tracking leads to users being presented with content that agrees with their viewpoints, separating them from critical thinking on topics they might agree or disagree with.
Controlled
According to the
In its report, Freedomhouse says. "While the threats to global media freedom are real and concerning in their own right, their impact on the state of democracy is what makes them truly dangerous."
The Internet media has been dramatically affected by the authoritarian regime and big corporations that support the authorities. We have previously seen social media succumb to the demand of the governments.
This trend has resulted in the rise of extremism that does the authorities' job for them, be it mob justice in one place and vandalism in others.
Getting unbiased information is now more complicated, and freedom of expression has become a threat, leading to persecution. Almost every information that comes our way is controlled.
Surveillance
Have you ever felt like your smartphone is listening to you? You talk about sneakers, and the next moment you open Facebook, Instagram, or a website, you see sneaker ads.
Big companies often carry out this constant surveillance that uses specific algorithms for targeted advertisement. By extracting data from users, they incentivize their clients and themselves.
This data extraction allows these companies to gather as much information on users as possible by whatever means they find.
Cookies on websites, click and search history, posts you interact with, all these actions you make online get surveilled, and the collected data get sent to these companies for personalized targeting.
For example, a common person can be influenced by targeted ads on repeat, changing their narratives and perception.
In that case, the technology can very well be used to manipulate various decisive events, for example, probable rigging of elections somewhere. If it is true, then this puts the integrity of the whole democratic process in question.
So, how do we take back control? How can we make media free and decentralized? Well, looks like the solution is out there.
Solution
Blockchain
Blockchain is a revolutionary technology that distributes power among people, and no single entity can control the whole network alone. Blockchain can promote community/user participation in decision-making, promoting transparency and fairness equally.
The media as a project can be governed by the community members or supervisors chosen by the members through a democratic voting process.
One can also bring a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) like organizational framework into play. As it uses a smart contract, maintaining an influence-free operation of the project/magazine/news outlet becomes easier and more trustworthy.
A community of members/users can be assigned content-producing tasks and give them rewards in the form of project tokens or anything of monetary value.
AI
Artificial Intelligence is one of the greatest and probably the only tools to fight misinformation and information bias. AI can help reduce subjective interpretation of data collected from humans using machine learning algorithms trained to consider variables that enhance AIs' predictive ability and accuracy.
Unlike humans, an AI's decision can be further explored, investigated, and even overlooked.
AI can also help in filtering and tagging content based on the selected personal preferences of the users, minimizing the possibility of a filter bubble.
AI can also detect fake news faster and with more accuracy. One can argue that with AI hype at its peak and numerous AI-driven tools like Deep Fake, content generators, image generators, and more, it is increasingly becoming harder and harder to detect true from false.
The fake content creation systems keep evolving as the detection system improves, making detecting fakes much more difficult. This is the reason why we haven't reached 100% accuracy yet. But we will discuss some potential ways around this later in this article.
Monetization/Incentivization/Compensating Contributors
A reward is the biggest motivation, and most media miss out on it. A handful of platforms give content creators and contributors freedom to monetize their content; however, most of them feed on user content to make a big profit.
Incentivizing and allowing content creators to monetize their content encourages them to produce quality content.
Since the community/users will be the king, the best content will have more interaction, leading to better popularity and better income opportunities through collaboration or earning tokens and more.
How Can Media Utilize Blockchain and AI to Maintain Fairness?
No Censorship
Big corporations often control media, and many people create and impose rules. This control leads to censorship, suppressing freedom of speech. Although censorship helps balance what's good and damaging to society, the concept stands against free speech.
Freedom of speech can also be debated. For example, hate speech on social media. Someone has the absolute freedom to say whatever they want, which is unacceptable because it is wrong.
But what's also wrong is when the whole power of censoring lies within a body or an institution; how do we know the process is fair or even just?
That is where blockchain can contribute. By allowing the community to participate, elect moderators, and rate content based on a rating or merit system, you can keep the good of censorship and avoid the bad.
Decentralized
A decentralized media means no central entity can control it. Free media often grows better when there's no one controlling it. The whole point of new media was to give people a voice without anyone having any say, but that seems long gone.
Undoubtedly, decentralized media gives users complete control over their content, personal data, and privacy. No single individual can create arbitrary rules. Here the community votes on the rules, and the whole process is democratic.
Merit/Reputation System
Reputation point is one of the ways media can be made fair. Reputation systems are algorithms that allow AI to rate users based on their activity or interaction on the platform to build credibility.
It can be understood with a Reddit reference where users upvote or downvote posts based on the quality.
An open to all platform is sure to attract a lot of subpar contributions, and monitoring and moderating tons of contributions can be extremely difficult for a team. By trusting the users and allowing them to rate content, the media finds an extra helping hand in filtering the content.
Good content will indeed receive better reputation points, while lousy content will either be downvoted or receive no upvotes.
The reputation system can further be tied with the tokenization of the project, rewarding content creators monetarily. The higher a user's reputation point, the higher the reward. This combination can encourage users to rate content critically, creating a moderation wall of filters.
AI-Based Recommendation Systems
One of the biggest problems and criticism the current media faces is tracking user activity and recommending content based on the collected data.
You may eliminate a few ads using ad blockers, but there's no going around cookies; this creates a filter bubble and limits users from gaining a new point of view that might change their perception.
An AI-driven recommendation system can be helpful that not just recommends what users like but also much more.
Quality Control With Rewards
Rolling out good quality content and maintaining the flow is a tough job. Usually, it takes a lot of time and work, which can sometimes be demotivating. That's where the community of users comes in.
When users interact with content, they rate it, and their ratings help them figure out which content is good and which is not. So, creating a reputation and reward system creates a circle of healthy contributions.
Users will rate good content, which will reward content creators. It will push more content creators to produce quality content since they'll know producing good stuff is the only way to earn more reputation points.
Users interacting with content also get rewarded for filtering, encouraging them to keep up the interaction for more rewards. The whole process soon creates a quality standard for content, weeding out the bad contributions.
Projects That Are Redefining How Traditional Media Works
Mindplex
Mindplex is an incubated project by SingularityNET. It is a complete multimedia platform that uses AI tools like a Reputation system and recommendation engine to keep the platform fair and open.
The reputation system helps Mindplex maintain high-quality interactions with the content, awarding users with reputation points for spending time-consuming content and interacting with content in Likes, Comments, and Shares.
This project has three different aspects: Mindplex Magazine, Mindplex Podcast, and Mindplex Content Factory. The magazine is where Mindplex editors and other esteemed writers write and contribute content.
Mindplex Podcast explores different verticals with experts and hosts Pubcasts where users can ask questions to hosts or guests.
Mindplex Content Factory is a decentralized structure running on blockchain where users can interact with other users, request content from them in exchange for tokens or some monetary payment, post content themselves, and do much more.
SteemIt
SteemIt is a decentralized blogging and social media platform application (dApp) based on SteemIt blockchain technology. It is an open to all platform that rewards users in its native token STEEM for creating content.
SteemIt is also popular in China as Medium, the blogging platform, is blocked in the country; hence, more users flock to SteemIt to publish their content.
Steemit is unlike your traditional social media platform, where you post about anything. Since there is a monetary reward system on Steemit, valuable content is given more importance. Users are selective and usually interact with good-quality content, rewarding content creators.
Another crucial factor is token holders. Users holding more STEEM Power have more impact on upvotes or downvotes.
Mastodon
Mastodon is a free and open-source media platform unlike any other. It lets users create self-hosted social networking servers. These servers are independent and are often based on different topics, interests, or themes.
Anyone can create or join an existing server to engage with posts such as likes, comments, share, and more, follow other users, create posts on things, and do whatever other social media platform lets them do.
Many people called Mastodon a rip-off of Twitter, but it is far from being a copy. First thing, it is decentralized compared to the centralized structure of Twitter. On Mastodon, you won't get your account deleted by Mastodon officials for any reason; on Twitter, you might.
Mastodon is made up of thousands of servers independent of any official body. Users can get their accounts moderated, silenced, or frozen by the server's admin.
Conclusion: Can AI and Blockchain Help Shape a Better Internet Media Landscape?
AI and blockchain have pros and cons, and we've only started seeing their prowess in many fields, including medic/social media. More AI and blockchain-based platforms are popping up, each better than the competitors.
We can only expect to see improved versions as these technologies improve. One day, we may have one or more platforms free of censorship, institutional control, surveillance, and covetousness. Till then, we will ride the wave, testing and enjoying what comes our way.