An architecture for data integrity in untrustworthy social networks

Social media platforms have the power to massively influence public opinion, and as such, are under increased pressure to submit to state regulation. They operate under a centralised model, in which users should trust the service provider that the information being presented has not been altered. This paper presents an architecture for enabling independent verification of content integrity in social networks. Our solution assumes a scenario of an untrustworthy social network provider, utilising public key cryptography for signing user content, and distributed hash tables for storing detached signatures. We have developed a proof of concept system that has been used to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed solution.