Blockchain can help news publishers fight risks posed by fake news websites

Credit: Alice Yamamura on Unsplash

The surge of generative AI has brought in a lot of headaches, and the surge of fake news websites is one of them.

It is not just a UK problem - NewsGuard, a US fact-checker, recently found that fake local news sites now outnumber real local newspaper sites in America.

Italian leading news agency Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata (ANSA) has been long looking for a way to certify the authenticity of its content. But the need for a solution became obvious during the covid-19 pandemic when several fake stories about when the government was going to lift lockdown restrictions were circulating online, all bearing ANSA branding. The consequences were far-reaching as readers, including government figures, were accusing the agency of fuelling misinformation.

So ANSA started experimenting with blockchain technology, which is most often employed to prevent tampering in financial transactions.

In collaboration with Ernst & Young (EY), they employed a watermark that allows users to verify that they are reading an original piece. It is not just an image though - the technology that underpins watermarking is essentially an unchangeable track of data, including ID of the creator, timestamp and other publication details. This allows users to verify who has written or posted each piece of content, the date, and any revisions and modifications.

When a story is published online, it gets an ANSAcheck icon that users can click to access all this data on a shared public ledger.

Screenshot from ANSA's website, showing the ANSAcheck watermark

On the flip side, a clone website can also easily use a watermark so verification requires a few extra steps for users, says Paul Brody, EY global blockchain leader who spearheaded the effort. Equally, it does not protect ANSA from making mistakes or publishing wrong information.

"The watermark doesn’t certify the truth, it just allows users to verify the source," he explains.

"I want to achieve more widespread verification of sources. But there is no getting around having to choose who to trust. You shouldn’t be forced into having a single authority to trust. With crypto, there shouldn’t be just one bank. For media, there shouldn’t be just one outlet."

Extra paranoid users can go a step further and run the entire article through their own "hashing". In simple terms, this means converting a piece of text into a fixed-length string of characters (called a hash), which is like a unique fingerprint for the input.

The only danger of this verification method is that it is very sensitive to any changes. So if there is even just one character that is different, you will get a completely different algorithm.

If you would like to try blockchain verification for your news organisation, you can check it out here.

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