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.”