GLOBAL ARCHIVE
There is no global news archive
As people become more aware of media bias, fake news and censorship, they will naturally seek systems that have trust at their core. NewsBlocks aims to allow anyone to build trusted news applications by creating a global decentralised archive of all the world’s news, free from bias, repetition, inconsistencies and censorship.
It’s amazing to think that there is simply no permanent, open, public record of all the world’s news, past to present. News is stored in thousands of places, in thousands of formats, that have to be accessed individually.
PERMANENT
As newspapers close news is being lost
News aggregators, such as Google News, are useful when searching for current news, but links drop off the system after a few weeks. Similarly, news articles drop off search engines because they are too old, or sites have died. There is no permanent archive.
UNCENSORABLE
Governments and corporations censor news
Google is working with the Chinese government to provide censored search results. Twitter YouTube and Facebook ban or demote opinions they don’t like. Putting news on the blockchain means that this cannot happen. Copies are distributed across multiple nodes – if a bad actor tries to remove it, then another node will refresh the deletion.
CONSISTENT
News archives are stored in inconsistent formats
Search results from news archives and aggregators are in the form of headlines that link to news articles. To extract the information they need, readers must discard inconsistencies, repetition, bias, and commentary from the articles.
CONNECTED
News articles are not well connected
The information inside news articles is difficult to search and impossible to sort and filter, because it is stored as plain text and not as data. Creating connections between data gives users the ability to create a multitude of new kinds of news products.
UNBIASED
Readers want less bias, less fake news
Bias is primarily inserted into news event reporting by journalists following the political viewpoint of the publication. Stripping news articles into just-the-data reduces bias and creates clean data for applications.
ROBUST
Centralized storage has a single point of failure
A distributed blockchain allows for news to be replicated across nodes. If one node fails, requests are routed through other nodes, creating a robust platform that guarantees access to news data.
OPEN
Not controlled by big players
A blockchain means developers can store, retrieve, and get paid for news without having to go through third parties that can block transactions or artificially manipulate prices.
ANONYMOUS
Safe for people in restricted countries
Contributors can verify and store news onto the blockchain without revealing their identity. This allows people who are in restricted jurisdictions to record news.
NewsBlocks aims to convert all the world’s news, past and present, into verified data and store it on a tamper-proof blockchain.
Anyone can use this global news archive to create a new generation of trusted news applications.
© 2018 The NewsBlocks Foundation