Fake news. This was the word of the year in 2017 for the Collins dictionary. However, from then until now many things have happened, too many. The rise of populism in the democracies of practically every country in the world, a pandemic, a war in the heart of Europe… all this has greatly increased the number of fake news on the planet. And the numbers keep growing.
In fact, the I Study on the impact of ‘fake news’ in Spainconducted by Simple Lógica and the Testimony Psychology Research Group of the Complutense University of Madrid states that 8 out of 10 Spaniards do not know how to distinguish real news from a hoax. For its part, the consultancy Gartner in a recent report states that at the end of this 2022, most Western countries will consume more false information than real news.
How the backing layer works
With this reality on the table, in Japan Keio University and Fujitsu have decided to create what they call a “backup layer” on the internet. What does it consist of? It is nothing more than one more way of trying to verify the information and thus avoid the unstoppable flow of false news and, with it, the disinformation of society. A backup layer that would be based on searching the internet for only authorized data sources.
This initiative would not be based on a single sensor or source of information. It would offer the user the opportunity to add data to the approval layer for cverify that the information is true. As Keio University itself explains, the result would be “a supporting graph with a data structure that expresses the connection between the additional information linked to the data”.
In this sense, both the recommendations extracted from the backing graph and the content would be superimposed on the web or on the applications on duty so that users understand the context of what in reality they are seeing, they will not distort it or decontextualize it. There would even be browser extensions that would allow users to be able to filter the approval graph information to suit their needs.
The purpose is, of course, to avoid the use of unreliable data, misinformation and false news. And it would apply to all kinds of news, especially economic and social news. A kind of ‘reliable internet’ that, for many, could sound like a true utopia.
It is not the first project that aspires to an internet without fake news. The World Wide Web Consortium has already proposed a verifiable credentials data modelthe EU is working on a Digital Identity Architecture and a Reference FrameworkY Hyperledger Indy from the Linux Foundation would help establish and verify the identity of the contributors to the backing graph.
