When it comes to the emergence of the concept of viral information, it is worth noting that their roots originate in antiquity. For example, in the first century BC, Octavian wages a false information campaign against his rival Mark Anton. He spreads rumors about Mark's drinking habits and his relationship with the Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII, allegedly he became her puppet. Octavian then publishes a document called "The Will of Mark Anton". The document notes that Mark bequeathed that after his death he would be buried in the tomb of the pharaohs. In those days, this news infuriates the people of Rome. But then it turns out that the news was false, fabricated.
In the 17th century, fake news became widespread in England. In this regard, during the reign of Charles II, relevant laws and regulations appeared. With the advent of the printed press, false news became easier to spread, and the presentation of information became a serious weapon. Thanks to the development of oral folk art, part of the fictitious information was transferred to fairy tales and epics. In fairy tales, epics, legends, which are considered the intangible wealth of the nation, positive heroes faced evil in the form of intrigues, scams and deceit. After the emergence of written literature, situations with the presence of deceit and fiction could be found in works of art.
So it turns out that journalism began with a fake? In the history of the mass media, several cases confirm that in the development of journalism, gossip and rumors constituted the main part of the news. Due to the fact that these news could not be verified, it was difficult to call all of them reliable. For example, the newspaper Canard (French for duck, unpleasant sound, out of tune notes and unexpected stories) printed news based on gossip, everyday events were interpreted on the basis of rumors and gossip. Confirmed reliable information was expensive. The nationwide French newspaper La Gazette (1631) regularly covered events in other countries. A 12-page edition cost 12 sous. With this money it was possible to buy two kilograms of bread, which would be enough to feed a large family. Due to the high price of newspapers, poor people rented newspapers. The American newspaper The Boston News Letter also cost a lot. Newspaper editor and publisher and former bookstore clerk John Campbell developed a strategic plan for the newspaper and found a sustainable way to collect information. In his speeches, he exposed lies. Fortunately, his newspaper was printed after being seen by the authorities. In general, before the press was formed as a model of traditional journalism, rumors and gossip were considered information.
To increase their circulation and thus earn decent money, newspapers did not stop at nothing, they could even unleash wars. The famous American media mogul William Hirst takes up this task and achieves his goal. When relations between the United States and Spain were tense on the issue of Cuba, Hirst sent his correspondents R. Harding and F. Ramington to Cuba. Then his wards send a letter with the text “Everything is quiet. It doesn't even smell like war. You can go back”, to which Hirst writes a response letter: “Stay in Cuba. Provide me with articles, and I will provide you with war.” After that, he publishes fabricated and fake news in The New York Morning Journals, thereby setting the leaders of the two states against each other. In the end, he gets his way and unleashes a war. As a result, the number of readers of his newspaper has increased several times.
Thus, the spread of deliberately false sensational publications, combining truth and fiction, is an inevitable consequence of both political and economic central events. The dissemination of such information affects politics, the economy and even the security of the state. In addition, they undermine diplomacy, democracy, public discourse and journalism.
And today, in the age of technology, information is reflected in what is happening around us much faster and more strongly. Online news is very often characterized by unverified facts and a lack of originality, making it even more difficult to fight against it. Complicating the situation is the fact that today it is very easy and cheap to create disinformation: it is enough for a person to have a digital platform available. Thus began the battle of artificial intelligence, fraud and cybersecurity. Thus began the arms race: AI against AI. AI has already been used to automatically generate fake news. For example, the OpenTI GPT-2 prototype text generation system uses machine learning to translate text, answer questions, and write fake news. When the sentence “Russia declared war on the United States after Donald Trump accidentally…” was introduced into GPT-2, the system created fake news:
Russia declared war on the United States after Donald Trump accidentally fired a rocket into the air. Russia stated that it "defined missile flight path and take the necessary measures to ensure the safety of the Russian population and the country's strategic nuclear forces. The White House said it was "extremely concerned about Russia's violation of the Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missile Ban Treaty."
What do we see and have today? That the correlation between news dissemination and quality assurance is broken. And many organizations and communities are working on creating projects to make it easier to recognize fake content. One such project is an ecosystem called Exorde, built around a core platform that provides objective assessments of trust in information based on a community and an artificial intelligence module. The idea of the project is to track the spread of information across the Internet in real time. The goal of the project is to find the source of viral information in its original form, before this information becomes viral.
The Exorde Labs team also announced the launch of Testnet v1.1. After all the improvements, data processing, observations and protocol setup of Exorde, anyone can become a tester.
The team has now released web scraping modules (only compatible with Windows for now. Linux and Mac coming later this summer) to participate in Testnet. At the moment, scraping (targeting an automated data collection process) is carried out on Twitter and Reddit. As we move forward, resources will expand, in which data collection will also take place. Moderation and formatting processes are also available. Moderation is a deterministic validation process to check if the URLs provided during scraping are valid (relevant, not dangerous, real data, etc.). Formatting is the process by which each block of data is broken down into sentences and parsed separately to link the information at a more detailed level.
At the next stage, it will be possible to download modules with open source code and take part in the next stage of the testnet. This phase will include more detailed web panels showing blocks of data being mined on the Exorde network, the number of free and employed workers, protocol details with additional statistics, URLs, and more. And at the last final stage, Testnet v0.2 will already be with improved staking mechanisms, rewards and dynamic protocol settings.
@ExordeLabs #web3 #protocol #exorde $EXD
Exorde approved by Coinlist, Nodes Guru, DropsEarn
Discord: https://discord.gg/C39qTfqgqN
