EUNOMIA: TRUST BEFORE YOU LIKE SOCIAL MEDIA MESSAGES

WHAT IS, HOW and WHY you should join EUNOMIA?

Two years ago, the European Union Horizon 2020 program awarded EUNOMIA, a consortium of 10 academic-public-private organizations, three million dollars to create a new type of social media platform on which content is first trusted and then liked. Due to my previous project, http://kredible.net, I was invited to serve as the computational social science officer of this organization, working with my colleagues on the master algorithms that will ensure the trust and credibility of the content supported by EUNOMIA. I am also very involved with disseminating the platform among independent civic and non-profit organizations, such as EnCiv.

EUNOMIA is now one and a half years old and is about ready to start testing its tools. We are actively seeking partners to work with us to deploy the real-life versiin of the toolkit. But what is EUNOMIA, at its heart, and how can it help us improve the quality of social media content?

EUNOMIA provides ordinary people, organizations, and businesses a new way to use social media. EUNOMIA has created a new social media platform that focuses on trust, not liking. EUNOMIA’s goal is to increase the credibility of social media content. EUNOMIA builds on open technologies freely available, such as Mastodon and Diaspora, which have the same functionality as Twitter or Facebook, while giving the users direct control over the content and their behaviors. The trust mechanism is built in the very functioning of the platform, which tracks the provenance of social media content. The defining characteristic of the platform is that users first TRUST then LIKE content. EUNOMIA also boosts trustworthy content by tracking the origin of social media content.

Any organization or even an individual can install and own a version of EUNOMIA, which is a federated network or “pods.” EUNOMIA is like the Internet, it is not owned by any single organization or even by one entity, it is an ecosystem. Its decentralization is ensured by a blockchain mechanism, which stores the trust information in a peer-to-peer network made by the EUNOMIA users, while sharing all the data anonymously across the entire ecosystem of users. EUNOMIA is, in effect, a decentralized trust mechanism, equally distant from all and equally visible to all. Because of this, it provides a common method of assessing and evaluating the trust of each unit of content, sharing it across pods. In the original spirit of the Internet, EUNOMIA social media allows individuals and groups to install their own EUNOMIA peer-client-node and its own social media servers that can talk to each other in a federated way. EUNOMIA grows with each new group that decides to install a version of the peer-client-node EUNOMIA on its own server. At the same time, each version can talk with all others, such that the users can also share content, assess its trust, and disseminate it as if they were on the same physical platform. 

Technically, EUNOMIA’s distinguishing characteristics are:

1. The data and the software belongs to the users
2. Access to data and to the users is controlled by each individual organization or individual that runs a version of this social medium
3. The trust mechanism is built on the blockhain architecture, thus it belongs to all and no one.
4. The main behavioral driver of the platforms is how much users trust the content, not how much the like it. Emotional responses are replaced by reasoned ones.
5. Trust is assigned by the users
6. Untrustworthy content is discouraged

EUNOMIA aims to test the utility and reliability of the platform in real-life conditions. To this end, it is constantly seeking media partners interested to disseminate their content (text, video, sound, etc.) on a federation of EUNOMIA media partners.

The partnership involves working with the EUNOMIA team to install a version of EUNOMIA, which includes a trust mechanism for evaluating the content, posting original content on the site, and encouraging the visitors to their digital platforms to use EUNOMIA as a means to enjoy the content.

There are several benefits for a EUNOMIA media partner:

1. The platform dramatically increases the quality of the content, privileging content that the users trust. Furthermore, the platform communicates trust through all interfaces and mechanisms, increasing the credibility and value of your products and of your brand.
2. The platform will act as a social medium for disseminating your content while you will own the platform. Ownership involves the ability to moderate the interactions, set policies, including privacy and copyright, and most important owners can monetize it in whatever way you deem fit if needed.
3. The platform can act as a supplement or complement to your on-site social interaction mechanisms, such as native comment features, third-party comment, and discussion section (such as Disqus or Facebook). The advantage is that owners will always control the platform.
4. The platform will grow with the media federation that is a part of, without huge investments in recruiting new users. As your users will be able to interact with users on other platforms, according to Metcalfe law, the value of your network increases exponentially with each new member in the federation you are a part of.

The EUNOMIA consortium will provide initial support for installing and launching the platform. EUNOMIA members are also interested in providing longer-term partnerships funded by collaborative grants, which will provide continuing technical and social engineering support. Consulting agreements are also possible.

Please reach out with a comment or question.