This archive report was first published on 13 January 2020.
US Blockchain Startup Aims to Challenge Eyeball Economy, Social Media Giants ¶
January 13, 2020
Civil Media Company, a New York City-based blockchain-for-journalism startup, has set itself an ambitious task of building a trusted web through blockchain technology to challenge the eyeball economy and social media giants like Google and Facebook.
"We want the civil platform to stand for being a trusted place for trusted content. And that's the promise blockchain technology holds," said Matthew Iles, CEO of Civil Media Company, in an exclusive interview with Xinhua.
The company's platform, rolled out in March 2019, uses blockchain and community governance to ensure that newsrooms that join Civil are granted exclusive access to tools like the Civil Publisher, which allows them to permanently archive content to the Ethereum blockchain and so they cannot easily be taken down.
Community members ensure these newsrooms abide by a strict set of journalism standards and ethics known as the Civil Constitution. Community members can challenge a newsroom that violates the standards and use decentralized voting credits known as "Civil tokens" to determine whether the newsroom should be removed.
The company's "next major piece of software" will be the Civil ID -- a kind of universal identity system for the web, said Iles. "In many ways, it completes our platform." The software will enable newsrooms to authenticate and control their content as well as own and govern their data, in order to better protect and monetize their original work.
"What that really means is that the user is the one who's in control of their identity payments and data. There isn't a password stored in some company's database that could potentially be hacked or stolen," Iles said.
More than 70 newsrooms from around the world with over 1,000 individual journalists have joined Civil. As Iles said, "Civil is on every major continent. We have roughly 500 token holders, apart from those journalists who are members of the public who have contributed and who want to support the project."
Civil is getting ready to field test the Civil ID for proving, tracing and monetizing content amongst trusted publishers, according to Vivian Schiller, chairwoman of the Civil Foundation.
