Inspired by our 2007 patent (# US20080066163A1) on Network Integrity via Digital Authorization (NIDA)2 that either blocked spoofed webpages at source or warned the users regarding integrity of such tainted content with a Veracity Seal on the content page, we modelled trust, reputation and authenticity into a browser plugin. The plugin design decentralized an intelligent framework that tokenized content to incentivize all the stakeholders with token rewards for creating, authenticating, curating, promoting and regulating high quality content that can also be monetized as NFT (non-fungible token) at content creator’s behest. We upgrade that design to incorporate a robust law enforcement module to regulate criminality of disinformation to assist local law enforcement jurisdictions in detecting, preventing and penalizing perpetrators of serious disinformation that constitutes a crime. This proposal also builds a full feature browser to implement VERIN’s dual token approach that motivates stakeholders and governments to democratically tackle the menace of information disorder.

Content misappropriation ranges from simple copyright infringement to more serious criminal transgressions like fake news and deep fake videos that have become a nuisance adversely impacting the masses on a daily basis. The meteoric rise of social media and IoT infrastructure has taken information disorder to unprecedented heights since the 2016 US elections. Hundreds of facts checking forums have sprung up since then. https://bit.ly/3bTj8f8. Almost all of them, including those claiming to deploy AI are centralized and vulnerable to subjective human judgement. Since, more often than not, the information disorder is politically charged, there are opinions on both sides of the disinformation spectrum that influence the fact-finding team’s objectivity. VERIN takes the original NIDA patent disclosures to the next level with blockchain & AI. Replacing human subjectivity with AI/blockchain algorithms and integrating the user-interface as a web browser that makes the VERIN system completely autonomous, objective and extremely user friendly as a versatile, dynamic framework to automatically check,authenticate, validate, rate and visually display peer verified blockchain record of the content’s ownership as a QRCoded NFT. The VERIN content authentication system covers the entire range of content misappropriation from copyright to deep fakes and even render content as an auctionable asset at NFT marketplaces.

In conclusion, VERIN framework incentivizes the participation of all the stakeholders with utility token rewards for creating, authenticating, curating, supporting good quality content, and also renders it monetization-ready for the NFT-marketplace. The project deliverables will thus assist policy makers, regulators & law enforcement increase the overall level of trust in our real time user-generated content verification system, and at the same time impose punitive damages for criminal acts. A simulation of VERIN technology is available at: https://www.VERIN.bc5.eu/#product