Specific Challenge:Future social networks, media and platforms will become the way our societies operate for communication, exchange, business, creation, learning and knowledge acquisition. The challenge is to mobilise a positive vision as to the role that Social Media will increasingly play in all these areas, and to overcome today’s critical issues about trust and governance through democratic reputation mechanisms, and user experience.Scope:Analysing and building the foundation of next generation Social Media platforms towards a “Global Social Sphere”, based on peer-to-peer/decentralised, community approaches and free/open source principles. This foundation shall enhance the role of prosumers, communities and small businesses, mastering technological barriers, introducing innovative and participatory forms of quality journalism, and using various data in a secure manner. These activities should contribute to overcome the current accumulation of power by central intermediaries often located outside Europe. Proposals are invited for one of the following four subtopics:Innovation ActionTrustful and Secure Data Ecosystem for Social Media and Media.a) Content verification – Development of intermediary-free solutions addressing information veracity for Social Media. The solutions to be developed shall contribute to the understanding of information cascades, the spreading of information and the identification of information sources, the openness of algorithms and users’ access to and control of their personal data (such as profiles, images, videos, biometrical, geolocation data and local data). Proposals are expected to develop and pilot solutions with a large existing community of citizens, and consortia may include inter alia partners from media, social media, distributed architectures, security and blockchain developers. Linked to this and in order to allow mastering better the complexity for users of Social Media, a Digital Companion interaction component may also be realised. The actions on this subtopic will cooperate for setting-up the basis of an observatory as described in d).

Source: Future Hyper-connected Sociality