Decentralized Content Vetting in Social Network with Blockchain

Online social network users suffer from rumors and misinformation. Most of these networks are centralized and controlled by a single entity. Such centralized entities may intervene to prevent the propagation of social media content that it considers as misinformation. However, such vetting entities may be biased and may selectively prevent misinformation. In this chapter, we propose a blockchain‐based decentralized content vetting for social network. We use Bitcoin as the underlying blockchain model, and we develop a unidirectional channel model to execute the vetting procedure. In this vetting procedure, all users get a chance to vote for and against a content. Content with sufficient positive votes is considered as the vetted content. We optimize the offline channel network topology to reduce computation overhead due to using blockchains. We prove the efficiency of the vetting procedure with experiments using simulations of content propagation in social network.