How can blockchain combat the fake news epidemic?

How can blockchain combat the fake news epidemic
The 21st century underpins today's disruptive digital economy, where creating and publishing digital content has become commonplace thanks to mobile devices and social platforms. But the accessibility of creating and sharing information online has introduced a new problem of fake news and misinformation. This has made it difficult to filter real news.

With continued advances in technologies such as artificial intelligence, digital animations and social engineering, the line between fake and real content will become even more blurred. Blockchain technology, which produces unchangeable, irrefutable and completely transparent results, can offer solutions to these problems.

As blockchain technology proves itself, various groups such as newsrooms, nonprofits, large corporations, and startups are eagerly pursuing the technology to create distributed, transparent networks for trusted media and digital information. So how can blockchain technology combat fake news?

The main problem with fake news is the speed at which it spreads. The rapid pace of sharing of such news has the potential to directly impact public relations. However, it can sometimes lead to serious political and economic consequences that are difficult to predict.

For decades, before the advent of technologies to combat fake news, such as automatic sourcing or anti-plagiarism systems, manual news verification was the only way to combat it. Next came projects and studies on using various machine learning and natural language processing techniques to identify misinformation. These projects mostly rely on formal analysis of text using a model trained on fake news text samples. However, this is a very time-consuming process and comes with database restrictions.

How blockchain fights fake news
The situation is different in blockchain, also known as distributed ledger technology.

Smart contracts store texts, photos, videos and their resources on a blockchain. Everything that goes into the registry has source data, like who posted a particular news item. In this way, it can be easily and quickly determined who shared a news, photo or video first or who it belongs to.

Gartner's 2020 blockchain predictions predict that by 2023, 30 percent of world news and video content will be verified with blockchain, against deceptive technologies such as deep fakes. Gartner also noted in this report that The New York Times was one of the first major news publications to test blockchain in verifying news photos and video content.

The NYT R&D team and IBM have partnered on the News Provenance Project, which uses Hyperledger Fabric's permissioned blockchain to store “contextual metadata.” This metadata includes when and where a photo or video was taken, who took it, and how and when it was edited and published. This makes it easier to fight fake news.

However, with the help of blockchain platforms, news sites can increase their transparency. Thus, it will be much easier and faster to reach the source of misinformation.