HELIOS CJ App: The decentralization of the Citizen Journalism Barbara Guidi Department of Computer Science, University of Pisa Pisa, Italy guidi@di.unipi.it Laura Ricci Department of Computer Science, University of Pisa Pisa, Italy laura.ricci@unipi.it Rolf Nyffenegger SWISS TXT Switzerland rolf.nyffenegger@swisstxt.ch Robin Ribback SWISS TXT Switzerland robin.ribback@swisstxt.ch ABSTRACT The decentralization of Social Media applications has gained im- portance in the last years. In this direction, the HELIOS project has been proposed in order to provide a decentralized platform for social applications. Among these several social applications, the Journalism field is considered an important use case. The main prob- lem which needs to be addressed is preventing the spread of fake news and ensuring the authenticity of the literature for end readers. Furthermore, with the rise of Citizen Journalism, the way of how people can participate to share information is changed. In this paper, we present the HELIOS Citizen Journalism App (CJ) developed in the context of the HELIOS project. The CJ App allows users to contribute content anonymously, based on blockchain technology. After publishing the content via the app, the content is available to publishers for further distribution, on a decentralized P2P and IPFS-based network storage. Furthermore, by making a donation for particular content, the CJ also receives remuneration. In this paper, we show the architecture of the App by describing its components and how it works. CCS CONCEPTS • General and reference → General conference proceedings; • Networks → Social media networks; Peer-to-peer networks. KEYWORDS Decentralization, Blockchain, IPFS, Citizen Journalism ACM Reference Format: Barbara Guidi, Laura Ricci, Rolf Nyffenegger, and Robin Ribback. 2021. HELIOS CJ App: The decentralization of the Citizen Journalism. In Con- ference on Information Technology for Social Good (GoodIT ’21), Sep- tember 9–11, 2021, Roma, Italy. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 6 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3462203.3475901 Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. GoodIT ’21, September 9–11, 2021, Roma, Italy © 2021 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-8478-0/21/09. . . $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3462203.3475901 1 INTRODUCTION The decentralization of Social applications has gained importance during the last years thanks to the introduction of technologies such as the blockchain. Principally, the interest concerning the decentral- ization is related to the several issues of current Online Social Media, such as privacy or fake news [11][6]. In this research field, the HE- LIOS project 1 has been proposed in order to provide a decentralized social platform. One of the proposed applications, based on the HE- LIOS architecture is the Citizen Journalism App. Indeed, among the several issues concerning the usage of Social Media, the spread of fake news is considered one of the most important ones [6, 13]. Concerning this issue, the Citizen Journalism (CJ) [16] is gaining importance in the last years. Political and economic crises around the world, and the need of Internet users to get news more quickly than ever, have increased the dynamics of reporting [5]. Whether it be police brutality against peaceful “Black Live Matters” protesters, marches against authoritarian regimes like the ones in Hong Kong in 2019/20, or manifestations against the Covid-19 measures, “ordi- nary people” on location are now able to report easily and quickly. They can then distribute their contents to media producers or share them via their own social media channels. Notable examples of citi- zen journalism are the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street movement, the 2013 protests in Turkey, the Euro- maidan events in Ukraine, and Syrian Civil War, the 2014 Ferguson unrest and the Black Lives Matter movement. A basic precondition for Citizen Journalism is anonymity. The more controversial the events (and consequently the contents), the safer the reporting needs to be for reporting individuals. The yearly Press Freedom Barom- eter published by the NGO ‘Reporters without Borders’ provides disturbing numbers of journalists and citizen journalists killed or imprisoned. This demonstrates impressively that technologies en- abling anonymity such as blockchain are not only of importance for worldwide corporate companies but could also help uphold values such as freedom of speech and protect human life. In this paper, we present the HELIOS CJ App by describing its functionalities and the details of the implementation. The HELIOS CJ App offers a new kind of platform and connects the smartphone with the blockchain. Indeed, it allows users to contribute content anonymously, based on blockchain technology, and on the Interplanetary File System (IPFS). The new end-to-end system for P2P Publishing contains the 1 https://helios-h2020.eu/ 31