A blockchain based Secure and Trusted framework for Information Propagation on Online Social Networks

The online social networks facilitate naturally for the users to share information. On these platforms, each user shares information based on his or her interests. The particular information being shared by a user may be legitimate or fake. Sometimes a misinformation, propagated by users and group can create chaos or in some cases, might leads to cases of riots. Nowadays the third party like ALT news and Cobrapost check the information authenticity, but it takes too much time to validate the news. Therefore, a robust and new system is required to check the information authenticity within the network, to stop the propagation of misinformation. In this paper, we propose a blockchain based framework for sharing the information securely at the peer level. In the blockchain model, a chain is created by combining blocks of information. Each node of network propagates the information based on its credibility to its peer nodes. The credibility of a node will vary according to the respective information. Trust is calculated between sender and receiver in two ways:(i) Local trust used for sharing information at the peer level and (ii) global trust is used for a credibility check of each user in the network. We evaluate our framework using real dataset derived from Facebook. Our approach achieves an accuracy of 83% which shows the effectiveness of our proposed framework.