EUNOMIA

Misinformation, disinformation and ‘fake news’ have been trending topics in the public sphere. After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the potential danger to democracy has been at the core of the debate highlighting the need to control this phenomenon. This showcases the urgency for citizens to take control of online information and get engaged with the content created. This is exactly the aim of the EUNOMIA project: to enable citizens to take ownership of the problem of disinformation by providing a fully decentralised peer-to-peer platform.

Building on an analysis of societal and human factors, technical development is underway. EUNOMIA is currently specifying its technical requirement and tools, including the cyber security and privacy framework, the blockchain infrastructure, the human-as-a-trust-sensor mechanism, the social media content and context data analysis, and the trustworthiness scoring. All of these technologies will be provided to the users in the form of a ‘digital companion’. The consortium meeting in Cyprus, which took place in May 2019, allowed partners to discuss user requirements and technical requirements, defining the next steps in the development. The technical tools will help users to answer three key questions: 

• Which social media user is the original source of a piece of information?
• How has this information spread and been modified in an information cascade?
• How likely is the information to be trustworthy?

Representing EUNOMIA @ CHI & ICT PD 2019

SYNYO participated in the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, which took place from 3-12 May 2019 in Glasgow, UK. SYNYO presented the EUNOMIA project in the workshop Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Exploring the Intersection of Philosophy and HCI, which was organised by Norman Makoto Su, Indiana University, USA, Victor Kaptelinin, Umeå University, Sweden, Jeffrey Bardzell, Indiana University, USA,Shaowen Bardzell, Indiana University, USA, Jed R. Brubaker, University of Colorado Boulder, USA, Ann Light, University of Sussex, UK and Dag Svanes, NTNU, Norway. The researchers discussed the way philosophy informs Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI) and the way we navigate, experience, understand, and judge the world with its artifacts.

SYNYO also represented EUNOMIA at the social media projects cluster meeting, which took place at the European Commission’s ICT Proposers Day 2019. This meeting brought together the projects funded under the same call, SOMA, WeVerify, SocialTruth, PROVENANCE, HELIOS, ARTINCONF, and EUNOMIA. The project members discussed how to collaborate and work towards the shared goal of curbing the spread of misinformation.

Two consortium meetings held

Since the project started in December 2018, and a kick-off meeting was held in January 2019, two meetings brought together the ten consortium partners to deepen ongoing discussions. Partners met in Cyprus in May 2019, focussing on the next steps in the technical development. In November 2019, partners met in Athens at the premises of University of West Attica and discussed the progress of EUNOMIA architectural components, integration planning, and the next steps in the co-design approach focussing on human and behavioural factors.

Links

https://eunomia.social/ 

Keywords

Social media, misinformation, fake news, HCI, human computer interaction, conference