AdBlock Plus Adopted Blockchain to Fight Against “Fake News”
The creators of the most famous ad blocking extension Adblock intend to get rid of identity theft and online fake data using blockchain technology.
Adblock Plus has released a new browser extension called “Trusted News” that aims to segment information into a decentralized database using blockchain technology. The announcement was made on 13th June via Adblock Plus’s website.
54% of the world’s population has Internet access
The Internet is known as a virtual space that offers both advantages and disadvantages. The online environment has been involved in recent years in numerous cases of fraud, money laundering, identity theft, corruption and other illegal activities. In December 2017, the reports showed that 54% of the world’s population has Internet access.
Unfortunately, there will always be people who will use the Internet for improper purposes. Nowadays, Internet users are being asked to be cautious about the information and advertisements they click on because of too many scams.
“Trusted News is our first step in the quest to fight disinformation. It is a simple browser extension (like Adblock Plus). It uses Metacert’s database of fact-checking websites to rate the trustworthiness of news websites. We designed Trusted News to be impartial, we don’t want to get involved in politics. Trusted News uses a simple traffic light system to alert you to the rating of a news website. It’s up to you to decide whether to continue reading,” read the official blog post.
The company behind Adblock Plus known as eyeo has launched a new advanced extension to identify and classify misleading information from the online environment. The extension of ‘Trusted News‘ classifies websites in the following categories “truste”‘, “satire”, “biased”, “malicious”, and “unknown”.
The version of the extension uses protocols such as “Politifact”, “Snopes”,’ and “Wikipedia” to verify websites. Also, eyeo collaborates with MetaCert Protocol to create and maintain a decentralized database.
About the future plans
Given that there are many blockchain-based companies, it might appear difficulties in identifying the safest ones. The extension “Trusted News” intends to collect feedback about using the Ethereum network for the newly released program and rewarding users with MetaCert tokens.
In the near future, eyeo also plans to develop a system similar to Steemit, that will award users for their useful feedback.
“What we want to do, and where the blockchain comes in, is we want to move that over to incorporate users’ feedback as well,” stated Ben Williams, the company’s director of ecosystems, adding that:
“So initially what we’re going to do in a few weeks is incorporate something where users can just provide feedback through the extension. And they can dispute something. They can say ‘hey I don’t feel like this site should be listed as biased because whatever’. And we’re going to use that feedback to make the product better.”
