How Blockchain Voting Can Help Fight Online Brigading
Blockchain could be a powerful weapon in the fight against brigading. The combination of blockchain and voting systems could also minimise the spread of dangerous misinformation.
Brigading has emerged as one of the drivers behind misinformation and online manipulation, ranging from downvoting content into obscurity to seriously damaging people’s lives and democratic processes.
Blockchain may not initially sound like a prominent tool in the fight against brigading, but a closer examination shows that it holds great potential to mitigate brigading issues.
What is Brigading?
There are different ways of defining brigading, such as a concentrated effort by one online group to manipulate another.
Here, we use brigading to refers to coordinated actions undertaken by one or more entities to influence the voting on or debate around a specific topic or through a particular forum.
Voting and debates can cover entire online forums or comment section on a given article or forum post or across broader scopes of content and opinions.
Examples of influence include linking to specific sites, promoting misinformation, spreading lies, downvoting or falsely reporting on the content or in other ways trying to manipulate the outcome through unfair or illegal means.
What Are Examples of Brigading?
Most people will probably know about brigading from online news sites, social media platforms, and online forums. Reddit and Facebook are often mentioned as places that are challenged by brigading. However, the issues around brigading extend to many other online sites. For example, to news sites where users co-ordinate to attack the views of certain commenters they disagree with or the post/article itself.
Suppose an article has a point on a controversial topic or a divisive person a group of people disagree with. In that case, they can either dislike/downvote it or attack it with misinformation, misrepresented facts or in other ways seek to discredit it. A different tactic is to release content with an opposing view and upvote/like it to become more visible.
An example of the latter is how users have manipulated review averages on the film and tv website Rotten Tomatoes. For Facebook, brigading has likely increased misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic and other events.
Why is Brigading Dangerous?
For one thing, downvotes often trigger comment throttling, so it can quite literally stifle someone’s ability to participate in a conversation. Furthermore, it has proven an efficient way for certain groups to spread misinformation or outright lies.
Some of the current misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines stems from brigading. Similarly, the fallout surrounding the results of certain elections can be traced to misinformation campaigns that involve brigading.
Brigading is also often tied to other forms of online harassment, social shaming, or other networked forms of abuse, including doxing, of both content originators and online users who have opposing/differing views.
Today, brigading involves groups that actively suppress valid information about safety and public policy that we would generally be able to read online. These groups diminish our ability to see accurate and trustworthy feedback and stories.
Can Blockchain Help Limit Brigading?
The short answer is yes, but it will take some effort. Blockchain technology’s strength in this context is providing a platform of secure, decentralised, anonymised, and auditable records that can be used to analyse voters’ actions.
Through blockchain, every user or voter can be registered with a unique key. They can effectively vote without risking revealing their identity or political preferences. It also allows news sites, social media and online forums to gain insight into metrics for posts and articles we engage with online. This can include identifying patterns between specific user groups and types of content, which can then be dealt with.
For examples, the results of a vote on an article or piece of content can become independently verifiable.
However, blockchain alone may not be enough. Although blockchain’s anonymised ledger system can help identify brigading, it still requires a coordinated effort that includes other approaches, such as big data analytics.
