  Nowadays, acquisition of trustable information is increasingly important in
both professional and private contexts. However, establishing what information
is trustable and what is not, is a very challenging task. For example, how can
information quality be reliably assessed? How can sources? credibility be
fairly assessed? How can gatekeeping processes be found trustworthy when
filtering out news and deciding ranking and priorities of traditional media? An
Internet-based solution to a human-based ancient issue is being studied, and it
is called Polidoxa, from Greek "poly", meaning "many" or "several" and "doxa",
meaning "common belief" or "popular opinion". This old problem will be solved
by means of ancient philosophies and processes with truly modern tools and
technologies. This is why this work required a collaborative and
interdisciplinary joint effort from researchers with very different backgrounds
and institutes with significantly different agendas. Polidoxa aims at offering:
1) a trust-based search engine algorithm, which exploits stigmergic behaviours
of users? network, 2) a trust-based social network, where the notion of trust
derives from network activity and 3) a holonic system for bottom-up
self-protection and social privacy. By presenting the Polidoxa solution, this
work also describes the current state of traditional media as well as newer
ones, providing an accurate analysis of major search engines such as Google and
social network (e.g., Facebook). The advantages that Polidoxa offers, compared
to these, are also clearly detailed and motivated. Finally, a Twitter
application (Polidoxa@twitter) which enables experimentation of basic Polidoxa
principles is presented.
