Author: Daniel Graf
We’re talking about accuracy and accountability in journalism with Decentralized News Network (DNN’s) Founders Samit Singh and Dondrey Taylor. In an environment where trust in information is at record lows partially due to sharing of fake stories on social media, we explore how to restore trust in content, such as news. What approach does DNN take? Read on to find out.
Q: How will DNN’s platform improve accountability and accuracy overall in the digital press?
Samit: By leveraging the wisdom of the community, DNN is able to get a broader view of the world from people who are experiencing the very issues that are being written about and who are extremely passionate about getting the story right, thereby enhancing factual integrity. With the same access to information and ability to directly contribute to news published on DNN, the people who use the platform can work together to create a network (and information source) through which everyone is incentivized to value factual accuracy.
Importantly, by removing the ad model entirely and structuring DNN in a way where accuracy is incentivized and sensationalism is penalized, we can give rise to a network that values and reward facts. Each participant on DNN is rewarded for their contribution, in the form of DNN tokens. Writers earn a reward each time an article is accepted by the majority of assigned reviewers. Reviewers earn a reward by accepting or rejecting articles based on their degree of accuracy. Lastly, readers earn a reward for pointing out further inaccuracies and recommending topics for writers to cover.
Q: Tell us how fact checking will work on the DNN platform.
Samit: Fact checking on DNN will work by involving reviewers and readers at various phases of an article’s life. Each reviewer and reader will be equipped with various open source tools (made by the community) and methods that will assist in vetting claims of different kinds.
Prior to the article being published, the review process starts by assigning a randomized set of reviewers who are incapable of talking with each other and who must vet the article’s sources using DNN’s content guidelines. With the DNN guidelines in hand, each reviewer must leave detailed feedback on the structure of the article, it’s sources, and most importantly, ensure that readers have as much information about any claims presented by the writer as they need to make a rational decision on what to trust.
The second phase of review involves the reader actively checking for inaccuracies over time, as new information becomes available. Just because something appears factual today, does not mean this will be the case in the future, for example as more evidence or sources comes to light. With that being said, giving the reviewers or writers the task of ensuring that the claims of their sources are 100% true in the absence of unavailable information is unfair. Keeping this in mind, it is the reader’s job to point out inaccuracies that surface, completing the review cycle.
Q: Did you find any inspiration from Wikipedia (including Wikimedia.org and wikinews.org). Do you find any similarities in your vision? (An obvious aside being your revenue model vs. the Wiki Foundation.) Feel free to address other models/competitors.
Dondrey: Wikipedia was a huge inspiration to the idea and development of DNN. Wikipedia is living proof of what is possible when we all combine our knowledge and work together collectively on something that benefits the world as a whole.
What DNN mostly shares with Wikipedia is this idea that everyone has a part in contributing to and upholding the openness of information. With DNN we believe that no single organization, person, or group of people should be in a position to easily influence our perception of reality and truth by piecing together information in a way that benefits their own agenda.
If the past has told us anything, it has revealed that getting the facts wrong can lead to negative and often irreversible implications for people all around the world. Like Wikipedia, DNN provides people with a platform and a set of well-defined rules that when utilized, creates an effective framework for discovering and relaying information transparently. DNN goes even further with transparency by storing everything publicly on the blockchain, and incentivizing every contributor to seek factual accuracy.
Another platform that has been tremendously influential to DNN is Steemit. While Steemit is more similar to Reddit than to DNN, it is a fantastic example of how cryptocurrency can be used to incentivize social behavior on a platform, which is a huge component of DNN’s review process. As one of the first social platforms built on the blockchain, it has paved the way for DNN in so many ways and has been an inspiration to DNN’s efforts to democratize publishing.
Q: How self regulated do you see DNN? Do you have a terms of use agreement for contributors on infringement, attribution, objectionable material?
Samit: Since DNN will operate across various jurisdictions it is imperative that the DNN platform is completely self regulated. With that being said, the DNN platform will have various mechanisms to ensure that proper attributions are in place, disputes can be resolved over copyright infringement, and proper labels can be attributed to content deemed objectionable. While neither the DNN network nor the DNN organization will be able to take any articles down, the network itself can incentivize proper labeling of content prior to it’s publishing that can make it easier for people to filter what articles they choose to view on their feed.
Q: Please give us a general sense of the DNN content guidelines.
Samit: The DNN content guidelines are a set of agreed-upon best practices for constructing pieces that are both comprehensive in scope and that convey the facts clearly and concisely. Most importantly they stress the need to separate the facts of the writer from their biases. Everyone on the platform has the same amount of access to the DNN content guidelines and can suggest changes that the community can agree or disagree to. The DNN content guidelines do not dictate what can and cannot be written about, but rather suggest a structure for the article while offering guidance on how to gauge sources.
Q: What online resources do you have for potential contributors to adhere to content guidelines?
Dondrey: The best place to get started is by joining DNN’s alpha and reading through DNN’s drafted content guidelines. There is also information on our guidelines in the DNN white paper on page 37 and in the DNN FAQ. We highly encourage the community to familiarize themselves with the guidelines and to suggest improvements that will help DNN achieve an editorial standard that gives rise to more factual and transparent articles.
Q: What role do/will professional journalists play in providing news content to DNN?
Samit: Professional journalists are masters of piecing together information into consumable articles that meet guidelines; this makes them highly valuable to the DNN network. Although DNN allows anyone to submit articles, it does not mean that every article will meet DNN’s requirements nor share the same degree of quality that would be informative and appealing to most readers. When it comes to news content, professional journalists play a pivotal role in discovering applicable sources and information that give readers more context about the article they are reading, and this requires skill. DNN’s platform offers professional journalists and average writers alike the ability to truly maximize their expertise.
Q: What are your goals in terms of percentage of content produced by lay people vs. journalists as DNN grows?
Dondrey: DNN’s goal is to have a decent mixture of content provided by everyday people and journalists as the network grows, with an initial target of 40% and 60% respectively. As the network grows, our goal is to involve more people in the review process and provide additional media literacy and tools that will help reviewers and readers vet articles.
Q: Does DNN have plans to display user profile data so that readers can gauge trust in content before they read it?
Dondrey: Absolutely. Each source referenced within an article and every user who participates on the network has a profile that represents who they are and what they have done in the past. Displayed on each user profile is a reputation score that indicates their level of trustworthiness. In the case of user profiles (e.g. writer, readers, and reviewers) reputation is derived by how positively or negatively they impact the network. For example, writers who constantly get articles rejected will have a lower reputation than a writer who gets articles more frequently published. Similarly, reviewers who often vote against the majority (i.e., with their biases) earn a lower reputation than a reviewer who votes according to DNN’s content guidelines. Our rationale for displaying reputation openly is to provide not only an additional layer transparency to everyone who contributes and reads DNN’s articles, but using the Hawthorne effect, keep people honest in the way they interact with network.
In the case of source reputation. Each article that includes a reference to a source has unique score that indicates how reputable the source is over time. For example, sources that are included in articles that are constantly accepted by reviewers, will amass a greater amount of reputation than sources within rejected articles. By including a reputation score for each source, reviewers, writers, and readers can use it when considering the factual integrity of future articles that get submitted.
Q: How do you see DNN content competing with frontline news organizations that have immediate access to events and breaking news? Is DNN supplemental and/or a different niche? How will DNN content localize as the network grows?
Dondrey: DNN can obtain information just as fast if not faster than traditional news organizations because anyone can freely contribute to it. DNN is an open network which allows it to operate irrespective of borders or resource limitations. As the DNN platform matures, new ways to include first hand accounts will be incorporated onto the platform, giving rise to more investigative journalism and breaking news stories that will truly make DNN the best place to publish virtually any type of news. When it comes to localization, one of the unique benefits of using the blockchain to publish content is that articles can be accessed and translated seamlessly by anyone.
As we look to refine the DNN network we will be exploring different roles for readers and reviewers to fulfill, including translation. It will also be relatively easy for any geographical region to run their own local version of DNN network that can propagate content to the global cross-border DNN network.
Q: What do you make of the predictions that Facebook is dying? The latest is on Vanity Fair: “This is Serious: Facebook Begins Its Downward Spiral?”
Samit: The issue with Facebook is that it has become a tabloid that sucks users in and gives them a place to continue reading the same type of content. “Filter bubbles” is a term referring to this phenomenon.
Simply put, our viewpoints, when combined with the personalized tailoring of social media, give rise to echo chambers in which we are mainly exposed to beliefs that are consistent with those we already hold. Consequently, this leads to confirmation bias. We unconsciously surmise that many others share our perspectives on issues of the world. A well-known Wall Street Journal experiment called Blue Feed, Red Feed delves deeper into these echo chambers that we all inhabit on Facebook.
Much of the news content in the feed consists of the most attention-grabbing headlines, regardless of whether the articles are factual or important. Facebook’s algorithm, as clearly witnessed with the recent glut of fake news, doesn’t take into account whether a particular story is accurate or not. If it generates a lot of engagement, in the form of likes, shares and such, it automatically gets moved to the top of the feed. And often, a sensational and blatantly inaccurate story will generate more engagement than a story that accurately explains an issue without exaggeration.
As a result, bigger news organizations are swayed negatively. Businesses trying to maximize the traffic to their articles are made aware that sensationalism attracts clicks and impressions, while accuracy does not. This huge demand for clickbait created by Facebook creates a false incentive for reporters, thus warping what we read and making us apathetic in the absence of facts. At the end of the day, Facebook was never created to place value on or share factual information, but instead to show you more of what you want to see from people you like, which may be and oftentimes is, counter to the truth.
Q: What would you like to say about presenting both sides as it pertains to facts vs. giving voice to something fake. (Note the difference from airing different opinions.) Where do you see that line for journalists?
Dondrey: DNN believes that providing as much context about the sources (e.g. how the source is funded, historical reputation, etc) included in an article in addition to separating the opinions of the journalist from that of the source, is the best approach to presenting informative articles that keep readers engaged without appealing to sensationalism.
What we want to do is find a balance on DNN. We don’t want our articles to be fully neutral or one sided, but as representative of reality as possible. One idea is to direct reviewers to vet articles for transparency of the writer. For example, has the article made the reader aware that the source included is funded by X government? Has the reader been informed that the data being referenced in the article supporting gun rights was done by an organization that sells guns? If we explore this approach, the question no longer becomes are these claims 100% true, but rather are these claims made in a way where the reader has all the context to reach an informed decision on whether to trust it.
Q. How will DNN accommodate other digital media, such as audio/video?
Dondrey: DNN stores all forms of media (e.g. audio, video, cached tweets, etc) on DNN publisher nodes that replicate this content across the entire DNN network, preventing its removal by any nefarious organization or individuals. One area that the DNN team is currently focusing on is coming up with ways that the community can vet the authenticity of audio and video using a combination of artificial intelligence (in the form of distributed neutral networks) and human assessment to help detect doctored media. By leveraging the community to create modules that enhance the review process (e.g. cross site plagiarism checks, retrieving additional source information, media assessment tools, etc.) the DNN network will be positioned as a major player in vetting and labeling all types of article content whether it is claims represented as text or multimedia.
Q. Where do you see DNN in five years? In ten?
Samit: In the next five to ten years, DNN will not only change the way news is published, but redefine what it means to be a journalist, reader, and reviewer by giving them the power to value facts over sensationalism. Whether it’s being used as a fact checking service or a tool to overcome censorship, DNN truly has the potential to be used not only as publishing platform, but as a way for existing corporate and state owned media organizations to leverage the community to build trust.
Q. Feel free to speak more on any points of interest.
Samit: DNN has hit some major milestones over the past year. Community collaboration may have sparked the development of our whitepaper, but we were happy to continue the trend once we began expanding our DNN community. We now have a great group of talented developers and writers helping us to better the platform, along with a number of influential advisers — from journalists to blockchain experts and mathematicians — guiding the DNN project through the many complex twists and turns any blockchain-based startup is bound to encounter. In the past month alone we have seen tremendous interest in DNN. Over 20,000 people signed up to read DNN published news while 2,000 or more signed up to review articles. We now have over 100 journalists around the world committed to writing on DNN. Also, we have added two new advisors. The future for DNN is looking great and we couldn’t be more excited to be a part of such an amazing project with an engaged and passionate community.
About DNN
DNN is a news curation platform powered by the Ethereum blockchain. It’s our goal to encourage the dissemination of factual, unbiased political news by incentivizing accountability at all levels of the news consumption process. We’re news for the people, by the people.
Read our latest stories on the DNN Medium channel. Visit the DNN website to learn more about our project. Stay up-to-date with the latest project news by following our social channels: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. You can also join our project conversation on Slack, Telegram, and Reddit. Our DNN token pre-sale is currently live. To participate, contact presale@dnn.media.
We’re currently in need of journalists, writers, readers, and editors to test out our Alpha updates! Check out our website today, and let us know what you think. Participating in our Alpha will earn you bounty stakes for our DNN Token.
