zkorum
In liberal democracies worldwide, the public space for open dialogue is diminishing, both online and offline. Disinformation, polarising algorithms, and bots have transformed social media into a toxic place where differing opinions are met with hostility rather than dialogue. Our core product, Agora by ZKorum, open-source under the AGPLv3 licence, is an eDemocracy tool designed to empower individuals to engage in free civil discourse to find consensus, paving the way for more resilient societies. Within the scope of this grant, our team will develop a Verifiable Moderation system based on a P2P network that will make our product, or any other social network, more censorship-resistant. This solution, developed as a third-party open-source (MPLv2) TypeScript library, does not aim to solve the “human aspect” of moderation: for example, whether we should moderate on social media, what content to moderate, who should be the moderators, etc. We believe that these fundamental values should be decided democratically, instead of platform CEOs. What we provide is a tool for any interested party to audit the moderation — ensuring that moderators are accountable for every moderation decision. The solution will be based on Nostr, a P2P protocol to broadcast the proof (metadata) of each post so that when a social media platform, centralised or federated, removes a post, anyone can independently use unforgeable cryptographic proofs to hold the platform accountable. This solution will make users less dependent on trusting platforms, a principle known as “trust-minimization.”
- Motivation for the project: ZKorum’s Verifiable Moderation solution, based on a decentralised protocol, provides transparency and auditability to any application that generates verifiable data, empowering users by minimising the trust needed in online service providers.
- Generic use case description: As social media becomes one of, if not the most important public arenas for civic participation, our use case tackles the challenge of balancing the need for moderation and the risk of censorship by providing a tool to audit the moderation.
- Essential functionalities: Upon receipt, the server cryptographically verifies the data, timestamps and broadcasts the proof to a Nostr channel. The client listens to this channel: seeing the proof serves as confirmation. Anyone can run a Relay to record proofs and check if the server has deleted the corresponding payloads
- How these functionalities can be integrated within the software ecosystem: Existing platforms must start generating verifiable data using credentials or other means depending on use-cases. Tools to do so already exist in the community, including our own. Once this condition is respected, integration with the described protocol is trivial using the client and server SDK.
- Gap being addressed: Most current Nostr clients are decentralised social networks using the protocol for messaging purposes. We use Nostr to broadcast the proof of each post, not the posts themselves. This way, even centralised servers could use our solution to provide censorship-resistance.
- Expected benefits achieved with the novel technology building blocks: The understanding of how to make the moderation system auditable, and open-source (MPLv2) TypeScript libraries, which could be relevant for a variety of use-cases including social networks, crowd-source databases like Wikipedia, etc.
- Potential demonstration scenario: The solution will be demonstrated in the context of Agora by ZKorum. As social media becomes one of, if not the most important public arenas for civic participation, we acknowledge the need for moderation and tackle the risk of censorship by providing a tool to audit the moderation.
Team
Yuting Jiang
Trilingual and
passionate about peacebuilding, Yuting is the Co-Founder & CEO of ZKorum, with diverse experience in building and selling tech products, as well as storytelling an filmmaking.
Nicolas Gimenez
Firm advocate for Digital Privacy and Free Software, Nicolas is a seasoned full-stack software engineer and DevOps with 10 years
of experience, specialising in DWeb, SSI, and Applied Cryptography.
Entity
ZKorum
ZKorum is a startup dedicated to building
open-source protocols and softwares to rehumanize and depolarize the online social landscape.
Website: https://zkorum.com