As the former director of Twitter and editor-in-chief of the online publication Wired, Evan Hansen had a front-row seat to the information wars. He saw public trust in the media plummeting, especially as the U.S. approached another contentious election, despite a proliferation of fact-checking organizations and tools. However, Hansen believes that blockchain, an emerging technology, could help combat the loss of trust.
Mr. Hansen is the co-founder of Factland, a crowdsourcing platform that provides users with cryptographic tokens to resolve online disputes. He envisions the service, built on Dfinity’s Internet Computer blockchain, as a competitor to X’s Community Notes feature, which allows X users to add context to false or unreliable posts. In the case of Factland, the service is designed to work under posts and articles across various social media sites and publications, and can be employed as a third-party verification tool.
Factland is still in beta testing mode, but Hansen told Fortune in an interview that he hopes to launch a native token next year and start working on partnerships to test the technology. “Our big bet is that there is a crowdsourcing opportunity where we recruit open information groups on the internet and these people can come together and investigate,” he said. “Blockchain allows us to create a transparent path where people can actually see how decisions are made.”
Fact Check 2.0
Hansen held senior positions at publications such as Wired and Medium before joining Twitter as editorial director, leaving the company a few months after Elon Musk took over. He has worked on fact-checking efforts in the past, and says the most persistent challenges are news organizations’ prioritization of story-building and reader skepticism about who is doing the fact-checking, especially He states that this occurs when people concentrate on small-scale information. group of people.
Factland leverages two core elements of cryptocurrencies: the decentralized nature of blockchain, which settles contracts without human intervention, and the ability to award tokens based on activity. Here’s how it works: People who sign up for a Factland account will be given a certain amount of tokens. They can take sides on various claims that arise in disputes, such as whether schools and hospitals are being “overwhelmed” by “illegal immigrants,” or whether Dorland Trump wants to cut Social Security. Can be done. Meanwhile, users can post evidence to support their position.
When a topic reaches a certain threshold of staked tokens, a “jury summons” occurs, inviting a random sample of participants to vote. The stakes are split between the winners and the jury also gets a prize. You can also reopen the topic for more evidence or further discussion. “That’s one of our guiding principles,” Hansen said. “This idea about the revisibility of truth.”
Factland is still developing its so-called tokenomics system, and Hansen acknowledged that certain elements of the process could be exploited. For example, Exxon can buy tokens and vote on sustainability arguments that support its position. But like predictive platform Polymarket, Factland is working on mechanisms to ensure its juries represent a diverse sample, as users will benefit from being on the other side of a dispute. Hansen said.
Factland’s main hurdle is the regulatory uncertainty facing cryptocurrencies in the U.S. A campaign of enforcement actions against blockchain companies by the Securities and Exchange Commission has made any token launch riskier. FactRand is similar to a derivatives contract and will likely have to be registered with a commodity futures exchange The Exchange Commission is trying to stop election gambling. Hansen said Factland is running on a grant from Dfinity, but has struggled to raise venture capital.
Still, Hansen believes the best way to combat misinformation and declining trust is an external system separate from news organizations and social media owners. “The problem with fact-checking in general is that everyone has already decided what the truth is, and they don’t care if there’s a fact-check,” he told Fortune. “So trying to build that into the fabric of how we consume information will be a huge success.”
