Interns’ Ideathon: Solutions to Build Trusted Social Connections

Fake social accounts negatively impact users’ trust in social media platforms. Many times, users are forced to ignore or reject genuine connections because of the inherent inability to verify a connection’s personal data. Further, this has dented the trust in social media platforms. Predatory behavior, scams, fake news, and more problems are the result of such fake social accounts, so it’s a pressing problem that each of us can relate to.

So, how do we address this problem of fake social accounts? Is it possible to create a social platform with only genuine users?

At LemmaTree, we asked these questions to our interns — brilliant minds who were welcomed under our inaugural Internship Program.

This ideathon was specially designed as an exciting challenge for the Singapore interns and centered around trusted data. Here are some of the incredible solutions that the five teams came up with.

Group #1: Team Podium

Team Podium divided the problem into three distinct processes, namely, account creation, account maintenance, and user behavior, and produced a solution for each. They also crafted a module to eliminate fake news and false information on the news feed. The team understood the potential limitations of their proposed solutions and presented ways to address them, making their solution a well-thought-out one that spanned across different aspects of prominent social media platforms.

Team #2: Ups

The team had a noble idea of addressing predatory behavior commonly seen on social media which not only reduces the trust among users, but could cause permanent trauma to minors.

To address this behavior and to enhance the trust and safety of other users, the Ups Team proposed a VC-based solution to verify personal information and an API that should effectively filter inappropriate messages sent on social media. Both solutions would combine to enhance social networks to penalize users with malicious intent and safeguard users from predators, resulting in the strengthening of trusted connections on such platforms.

Team #3: Reliabae

As the name perfectly reflects it, Reliabae is the solution by the team that seeks to address the trust and reliability issues in online dating applications, returning reliability of the applications to users looking for genuine connections. Reliable is a VC-based dating app that eliminates fake accounts and identities using a two-pronged approach — incorporating APIs to fetch verified data and the use of deep neural networks for image recognition.

Team #4: Super Identity

Also looking to solve the challenge of fake accounts on dating applications is Team #4. And they’re doing it through their super solution, Super Identity. It is a Single Sign-On (SSO) application that provides an easy and secure way for users to verify their identity on social media. One of the key highlights of Super Identity is that it is scalable and can be used on other social media platforms beyond the dating scene.

Team #5: Protego

Team #5’s Protego is a community-based social media application, which requires users to verify their identity to access the full set of features on the platform, and helped to eliminate fake news using an NLP model. Users can request for Verifiable Credentials from trusted organizations like schools and institutions. The solution proposed by the team also had an elaborate timeline which showcased the thoroughness of the team in ensuring this solution’s success from launch.

All five solutions were well presented to the judge — Duy Dang, the Head of Engineering of Trustana, one of the entities under LemmaTree. Duy gave great advice and comments to the teams based on the judging criteria provided:

• Creativity and usability of the solution.
• Does the solution leverage the concept of trusted data?
• Were Lemmatree employees’ opinions incorporated into the solution?
• Quality of presentation
• Bonus: Practicality of the Solution

In all, these solutions provide a glimpse into the power of trusted data and the limitless possibilities of what you can do with trusted data. We would like to thank all participants of the ideathon and we’re excited to see some of these solutions getting launched in the near future!

If you’d like to talk about specific use -cases or learn more about creating and using trusted data, reach out to us.