ANOMUS: The Antidote to Manipulated News
ANOMUS is a 100% decentralized news protocol providing the world access to fairly distributed news. Anyone on the platform can become a news publisher independently of one's geography, political or religious views. The right to publish and the right to free speech comes first.
The readers can then choose to interact with the content, upvote it, rate it and share it with their peers or not. As people are free to publish, the readers are free to interpret as they see fit. Platform surfers can select which authors to subscribe to, which content to promote and what to challenge. Every piece posted on the ANOMUS platform is a work in progress - community members and industry experts can suggest annotations to broaden the article scope, offer opposing views to expand the base and link articles to other published pieces in terms of the general topic, subject, or other means.
Publishers can choose to identify themselves or work under an alias backed by a blockchain address, it is entirely up to them. Producing quality content can unlock different tiers and badges, increase the amount of earned incentives and audience reach.
Another important part of the ANOMUS content ecosystem will be fact-checkers and annotators who'll scour the platform in order to find and flag fake news, unsupported claims and challenge content producers. Similarly producers, fact-checkers will have the option to build reputation and earn ANOMUS tokens for their effort to make the platform more informative, balanced and well-rounded.
- Decentralized. The ANOMUS platform will not have any political agenda or governing body that will sanction certain forms of content or discussion. All protocol changes and integrations will come from within the community and will have to be approved by a governance vote. Only the majority of token holders and stakers will have the power to introduce changes and shape the development of ANOMUS. The power will always lie within the Vox Populi.
- Open for all. The news and content platform is created to serve as a distributed platform giving every individual or entity a right to participate within the ecosystem as a publisher, consumer, validator or any other way irrespective of political or religious leniency, ethnicity, nationality and gender.
- Fake news resistant. It will be increasingly expensive to spread fake news through the platform as every publisher will need to stake a certain amount (higher for new publishers with a decreasing stake algorithm for reputable correspondents) of ANOMUS tokens which will be subject to confiscation if the community would deem the article purposely misleading, factually incorrect or ideologically-driven.
- NFT-backed ownership. Every content piece on the protocol will be backed by an NFT token giving it authenticity and a certificate of ownership. The whole track record of publications coming from a certain address can be inspected at any time. Any author can be checked for plagiarism, past biases, content themes, and affiliations. Publisher entities can offer to buy published NFTs to start amassing online wisdom on certain topics and areas of political or conceptual discourse. With ANOMUS original thoughts can be owned and traced back to their discoverers.
- Anonymous by choice. Reveal your identity or keep it secret - it's entirely up to you. ANOMUS stands by its name and values every person's right to privacy. Every account will be associated with a public key with which all on-chain transactions will be recorded. However, every publisher, fact-checker, reader, and user on the platform will have the option to select an alias, nickname, or come forth under his/her birth name. We expect some users to embrace the latter in order to attract followers and leverage their reputation.
As journalists have the code of ethics, similarly the ANOMUS platform is constructed on core principles to be followed and adopted in order to fulfill its mission and attract truth-seeking individuals and entities from all around the world. The key pillars we strongly believe are essential to make decentralization not only a part of the economy but also a fundamental part of the society.
To find a balance in this tribal world, all sides of the equation should be considered and allowed to put forward arguments supporting their points of view. It often takes back-and-forth dialogue, especially on complex and controversial topics. Therefore, the ANOMUS platform strives to become a politically and ideologically neutral and welcoming platform for the sake of getting to the truth or as close to it as possible.
In order to maintain neutrality, the network must operate on the grounds of trustlessness - there cannot be a solely centralized editor or governing body that decides on what content can and cannot be put on the platform. The blockchain architecture is the perfect solution for this purpose - it ensures that fair and distributed governing mechanisms are in place and the authoritarian rule of the platform and its contents is impossible. Neither internal community members will have the right to exert influence on the platform, but that will be impossible for outside actors (countries, corrupt organizations or government institutions) to stop information from spreading or changing the broadcasted narrative.
It is extremely important to preserve the freedom of speech and opinion. By silencing 'wrong' opinions we indoctrinate the society, make it rigid and harder for the truth to be revealed. People shall have the right to say what is on their mind, as long as it's not invoking violence or direct threats at the subject of critique. Content will have distinctive flairs that will allow sorting topics, subjects, related contents and other discussions on the platform, but there will be no exclusion. The freedom of speech and expression is the core value upon which the platform is being created. It is getting increasingly valuable for society to have a platform where whistleblowers, debunkers and sceptics can challenge the status quo through a safe and blockchain-secured platform.