A Hybrid Blockchain for User Rating in Social Media

Abstract

Social networks have made a revolution in the way how people connect, communicate and share information with each other by leveraging the Internet as the platform. Social networks are open platforms where users can enjoy their freedom of expression to the maximum for posting anything online. Except for a few occasions, censorship play minimum or no role in the social media networks. Hence, it is the responsibility of the reader to identify and choose the content that is suitable for him to read or repost. Some researchers have created mechanisms for evaluating the contents posted. But, presently there is no mechanism for rating users based on the type of material they post online. In this research, a blockchain powered mechanism is proposed for rating users based on the comments received for their posts. The proposed mechanism leverages the advantages of blockchain including transparency, immutability, traceability and security. The proposed mechanism rewards users for their good behavior using non-fungible tokens and revoking them for misbehavior. The proposed mechanism has been tested using publicly available data and a set of students in a simulated environment. The evaluation results are promising as it can identify users who continuously post good or malicious contents online and rank them accordingly.