In the Russian-Ukrainian propaganda war, can Web3 subvert the discourse power?

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine not only occurs on the battlefield, but also in the public opinion field.

At the beginning of the war, many Western officials urged major social media platforms to block "Russian state media" and propaganda; at the same time, these platforms were also under pressure from Russia. So far, technology companies such as Twitter, Meta, Google, and YouTube have made a number of sanctions against Russia, including deleting "false information" from Russia, prohibiting the display of "Russian state media" advertisements, and restricting access.

The New York Times published an article on February 28 titled "The Ukraine War Tests the Power of Tech Giants," stating that "For some of the world's largest technology companies, the Russia-Ukraine conflict has become a decisive geopolitical moment. Their platforms have become the main battlefield of a parallel information war, with data and services becoming a key link in the conflict."

However, under the conflict between power and discourse, blockchain technology is also playing a role in its own unique way. Projects such as Arweave, which are committed to permanent storage, are trying to ensure that history will not be rewritten by a certain ideology. There are also some DApps that can fairly verify some so-called "fake news" and trace the source of news and the dissemination process. In this way, the public can at least have a more fair and transparent way to identify whether the news is true, rather than having some giants make arbitrary decisions.

In extraordinary times, we see a large number of blockchain applications being put into practical use and improving our public opinion environment and public space.

Data Permanence + Collective Memory:

How blockchain records the truth

Since there has been news, there has been fake news. People need to spend time and energy to distinguish between truth and falsehood, and this is the meaning of freedom. During the Russia-Ukraine conflict, social media such as Twitter and Meta announced that they would specifically delete Russia's "false information." In this process, the social media giants of Web2 are defining the "true and false" of news.

In George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, there is a document destruction tool called the "Forget Hole," a large furnace with a door. When documents are thrown into it, history disappears. People can "correct" history at will through the Forget Hole.

How to fight against forgetting? Web3 provides a solution, namely data permanence + collective memory. In an ideal world, assets should be absolutely safe, and the dissemination of information should not be controlled by centralized institutions, which is exactly what Web3 has been committed to achieving.

For example, the Arweave community is calling on people to use decentralized storage platforms to back up and save war records, especially "fake news" that is being deleted by Web2 social media, as well as history and culture that may be destroyed in the war. They hope to become "information carriers" and objectively state history as witnesses, allowing history to speak for itself. In this process, there will be no censorship or withdrawal, no files that are defined as useless will be deleted, only raw data, waiting for time to decide.

Sam Williams, founder of Arweave, said in an interview: "In each case, we later realized that at least part of the facts were untrue, including the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Gulf of Tonkin incident in Vietnam, and the Gleiwitz incident in 1939, which were initially misreported in some form," but "If we had not stored information that we now know to be false in the archives about the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Vietnam War, or the 1939 invasion of Poland, we would not be able to understand how these wars started."

As of March 8, 12.5 million relevant files have been uploaded to the Arweave network. In addition, crypto-native projects such as Decent.land are also doing similar things. More and more users and communities are joining this action to expand the source of war information extraction.

How will Web3 change the media industry?

Beyond war, in our daily lives, blockchain is also helping to improve the public opinion environment and public space.

1. Protecting the freedom of creators

This includes the freedom to create content and the freedom of the creator's identity. First of all, Web3 is an Internet open to all users. Any creator can have a decentralized network identity, which does not belong to any platform and will not be "blocked". On this basis, creators can also have complete ownership and disposal rights of their own content. Information on the blockchain cannot be deleted or tampered with. Even if it needs to be modified, it can only be done by adding new records, and the old information cannot be erased.

Media platforms that use decentralized storage can also alleviate the problem of slow content loading at high resolutions, which is widely used in decentralized streaming media, such as Theta and Dtube. These projects use token incentives to encourage users to contribute their idle broadband and computing resources, making their devices cache nodes in the network. Users who watch videos can obtain video content from the nearest cache node instead of from the CDN server base station.

2. Verify and combat false information

Once reports and speeches are put on the chain, they cannot be revoked or changed. In this way, people can easily grasp the true credit status of the other party; irresponsible fraudulent behavior will also be curbed. Willing to put information on the chain is also a manifestation of being responsible for one's own speech, which will force those media that do not do so. In this way, it is hoped that reliable source ratings can be provided to users, the communication environment can be purified, and trust relationships can be rebuilt.

In addition, content on the chain does not require centralized institutions to review. For example, Permacast is an uncensorable podcast protocol. Audio files uploaded through Permacast will be permanently stored and minted into Atomic NFTs. So, in this case, will decentralized media be overwhelmed by illegal content and inappropriate speech?

In some special contexts, this problem is inevitable. For example, in the call for Arweave to back up and save war records mentioned above, the community believes that it is more important to get everyone on the "life raft" and then solve the problem.

Of course, we can also see some practical solutions. For example, blockchain technology can allow editors to open up the power of review to professional reviewers and ordinary citizens. By introducing external review resources, we can effectively solve the problems of strong subjectivity and abuse of editorial power in the past review process, and improve the quality of review. In the review process, the original manuscripts of the contributors, revision records, reviewer opinions and reader comments can all be traced. This will obviously help to improve the quality of news as much as possible in a fast-paced information dissemination environment, and it will also help to improve the relationship between the media and users and reduce costs.

For example, Civil aims to build a sustainable and self-sustaining news publishing and distribution platform, free from external influences such as advertising and fake news. Users who hold Civil platform tokens will be able to vote on key decisions of the newsroom and determine whether the newsroom meets the ethical standards set by the community; they will also reward a certain percentage of funds to users or professionals willing to participate in fact-checking.

3. Promote content monetization

First, blockchain provides a new way to protect copyright, and users can "recreate history" through block data and timestamps, etc. Copyright information becomes clear at a glance, and anyone who wants to reprint the content can easily determine its permission, ownership, and related reprint payment requirements.

At the same time, creators can bypass media organizations and advertisers and achieve a direct relationship between newsrooms and readers. This not only means that content producers can "sell" their individual reports directly to readers point-to-point, but also means that content can, to a certain extent, break away from the old model of relying on advertising and obtain new sources of funding.

Take the decentralized personal blog Mirror as an example. A number of stakeholder DAOs are formed around a single article on Mirror, in which the creator, as a content producer, is bound to the content through the ENS identity system. When publishing an article, the creator needs to log in with a signature key to obtain writing permissions, publish content, and confirm data; the creator earns start-up funds by publishing content crowdfunding and retains part of the NFT share, while investors hold partial ownership of the article by investing in NFTs, and each transfer of NFTs can bring a certain proportion of income to the entire token holder, including the author and the NFT holder.

In addition, some new ideas of Web3 are also affecting the traditional media industry. For example, in an interview last year, Vitalik Buterin envisioned using Quadratic Voting to allocate funds to the news industry. He pointed out that news is a public good, and if it is completely dependent on the market or the government, various problems will arise; using Quadratic Funding to handle financial support for the news industry may also try to avoid market failure or government dereliction of duty. For example, a fund pool for media funding can be established, and funds can be allocated to suitable news organizations or projects through the Quadratic Voting method.

Conclusion

Web3 breaks the monopoly, returns information to users, and provides new ideas and tools for the current media industry. In the crypto world, is it possible for the "liberal" news ideals of the 17th and 18th centuries to see the light of day again? In the future, users may be able to discuss in the "free market of opinions" without external constraints and for a fee, and opinions will be "self-corrected" in the discussion and become clearer and clearer.

But at least now, with the help of Web3 technology, we can at least hear and record the voices of both sides of the conflict, rather than just resorting to sanctions and counter-sanctions.