Facts Authenticity and Credibility Tracking System (FACTS)

In recent years, the increasing diffusion of misinformation has represented one of the biggest challenges of our time. A trustworthy mechanism to assess the authenticity and credibility of digital content is needed more than ever. The European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI) offers a standard solution to the decentralisation of information and trust, ensuring European digital sovereignty and providing a solid foundation for building transparent and tamper-resistant systems. This work presents FACTS (Facts Authenticity and Credibility Tracking System), a decentralised system for verifiable fact-checking based on EBSI. A simulation framework replicating core EBSI components has been designed and implemented to enable controlled experimentation and end-to-end validation of system workflows. The simulator reproduces authorisation, decentralised identifiers (DIDs) management, and track and trace functionalities, supporting realistic interaction patterns among system actors. On top of this infrastructure, FACTS focuses on tracking content authenticity and fact-checking assessments by enabling Publishers to register article claims and Fact Checkers to publish credibility assessments through Track and Trace documents. Verifiable Credentials (VCs) are used to establish identity and authorisation, ensuring that only trusted entities can operate within the system. The results show a fully functional system providing a verifiable and auditable framework for fact-checking, integrating identity, authorisation, and traceability mechanisms within the EBSI ecosystem.