September 10, 2020
A decentralized finance data company works to fight fake news. The Graph, a San Francisco-based company that organizes information about Ethereum blockchain so dapps can have easy access to it, said in a blog post today that it works to make public data accessible to all that this will help combat fake news.
According to The Graph, the idea is that societies would be able to rely on “a global data source that was auditable for news, events, content, financial data and information sharing.”
As of now, a lot of data is guarded and difficult to access and make sense of quickly. For example, Market data is held by a handful of top societies like Bloomberg and Reuters, that have the resources to collect, analyze, and distribute that data – for a substantial price.
The Graph wants to adjust this by making a communal global application programming interface (API) that is “accessible to all and curated by the community” (anyone wishing to be involved or use The Graph’s services), in turn, prevents a “privileged group” from having control over public data.
The Graph has some experience with this; founded in 2018, the company works to give developers the ability to demand specific blockchain data that is not easy to access. Their clients include Synthetix, Uniswap, and Aragon.
The author of the post, Eva Beylin, used Ukraine International Airlines Boeing 737 that was shot down in January by the Iranian military. She noted that when first trying to piece together what had happened, there was a lot of conflicting information online.
The Graph wants to alter this by making it conceivable to put auditable data online – on a blockchain – so that it “can’t be misconstrued.”
She discussed that this would stop false data being shared because cryptographic shreds of evidence would provide security and certainty about where data initially came from and because timestamps can’t be altered or faked – something that led to problems in the past with verification.
Despite the right purposes and high-tech solutions, Beylin said that human biases would be challenging to change.
“Human desire to drive conclusions in our favor also isn’t going to change, even if we verify all sources necessarily,”
she wrote. “Politicians promote propaganda, and companies withhold data, journalists cherry-pick facts. Despite warnings of inconvenient untruths, we often still trust our biases.”
Furthermore, Beylin elaborated that it may hard to verify whether “on-chain commitments are truthful in the first place.” In short: garbage in, garbage out.
Tegan Kline, who leads the business development at The Graph, said:
“I think that with the internet, information came so freely and quickly that we do not know what to believe anymore and question everything.”
She added: “Prior to, information was cited and it was much more difficult to have fake news…If we get back to citing sources and actually being able to know where information comes from via blockchain technology, we can restore faith in information during the Internet age.”
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