Alberto Alemanno pointed me to the story of Eunomia, which very much looks like a recently launched Horizon 2020 project trying to come up with some system to detect fake news. The link above leads to a review written by a site called One Angry Gamer, a news website that covers gaming, but also internet freedom and “ethics in journalism”. The money quote (emphasis mine):
A European Union-funded initiative called Eunomia has contracted various thinktanks, tech groups, and Fediverse evangelists to help with a new social credit scoring system. The system will be applied to social media and the federated destinations using blockchain technology. It will be governed by a crowdsourced system where groups rank up and rank down the trust levels of information. In simple terms, it’s an adaptation of China’s social credit scoring system for the Fediverse. Well, someone working on the project leaked some chat logs, and it reveals a rather antagonistic nature from the people working on the project toward the users who are skeptical of this EU funded project. […] This obviously didn’t seem like an innocuous project from the EU especially given the Union’s recent anti-freedom of speech initiatives like Article 11 and Article 13. […] Why is a social scoring system even needed for social media if users didn’t ask for it?
Note the reference to the Fediverse. One of the partners is Eugen “Gargron” Rochko, the creator of Mastodon. It seems reasonable to deduce that there is quite some trust to rebuild, and that suggests a lot of listening in NGI, and not so much speaking.
And a question to @johncoate. Where does this type of post go in the public space? It was not obvious to me, given the cats you made.