Blockchain to curb fake news

With the US presidential election set for next month, concern over fake news has once again dominated public discourse. Fake news – the deliberate dissemination of verifiable false information under the pretext of being authentic news – not only undermines public trust in the free press, but ignites social conflicts, can cause health risks (such as ingesting bleach in the COVID attempt. -19), gives rise to radicalism, undermines the integrity of the elections and manipulates the markets. In short, fake news threatens the social trust we have in our institutions and in each other.

Common solutions today, such as fact-checking websites and artificial intelligence algorithms, are implemented only after the fact: they aim to detect fake news that has already been created. The University of Arkansas Blockchain Center of Excellence has just completed a case study on ANSAcheck, developed by the National Associated Press Agency – the leading news service in Italy – and the auditing firm Big Four Ernst & Young, which adopts a different approach. ANSAcheck authenticates the source of a news and guarantees “the news came from ANSA”.

ANSA had already received news of an impostor. In March 2020, for example, there were at least three stories of imposters related to COVID-19. The fake stories were distributed using the ANSA brand, format and signature. Instances like these have prompted ANSA to launch the ANSAcheck project.

Stefano De Alessandri, CEO and CEO of ANSA, said:

“Fake news is one of the biggest challenges facing traditional media organizations and social media platforms as it undermines the trust they have built with audiences and advertisers by undermining their strategic asset which is their reputation. […] If we lose confidence, we lose everything “.

The ANSAcheck project started in 2019. Giuseppe Perrone, head of EY’s blockchain initiatives in the Mediterranean, was the leader of EY. The ANSAcheck solution works by assigning a unique hash ID to each news created by ANSA and publishing the hash on Ethereum, the largest public blockchain platform in the world. If even a letter in the story is changed, the system will detect that it is not an identical copy to the original story. Story IDs are grouped and posted multiple times a day on Ethereum. If ANSA updates the story, another entry is recorded on the blockchain and re-linked to the original entry to form a chain of origin.

Each ANSA story published on its website is accompanied by an ANSAcheck sticker to signal its authenticity to readers. Readers can click on the ANSACheck sticker to query the blockchain about the source of the story. As of 6 October, 532,727 news from ANSA had been published on the blockchain. About 72% of ANSA readers had clicked on the ANSAcheck explanation card to find out more, while 38% of people who viewed the article actually clicked on the sticker to validate it.

When users click on the ANSAcheck sticker, the console viewer shows the details of the transaction on the blockchain. Each story receives a unique ID using MD5 encryption. In this example, the title of the story is “Johnson, I still have fever, I am isolated” and the unique story ID is “5b456347bf699bb9807b742e132c9120”. This story was created on April 3, 2020 and the Block ID is “AC202004031330”.

In the image above, users can see where the story is stored on the Ethereum blockchain. The story was added to Ethereum block number 9799299 on April 3, 2020 at 01:34:26 UTC. The unique transaction hash is “0xadc600195857be4f138b1a15b400ee4adf799cae462e3d6abaf1ecca8c52928d”. By pressing the verify button on the console, the application performs a real-time verification of the history.

The first phase of the solution was implemented in April 2020 using a smart contract. The smart contract mitigates the risk of Ether (ETH) price volatility by postponing the processing of new stories if the current cost of Ether is too high. EY also keeps transaction costs low by bundling multiple news items into a single transaction. Initially, EY published a batch of stories every 15 minutes, with an average cost per article of $ 0.06. Most recently, EY has been batching about 500-600 new items every six hours, so the cost per transaction has dropped to around $ 0.006 per item. Ethereum’s costs drove the decision to reduce authentication times. ANSA stories usually arrive in the news feed before being launched on the website, giving EY time to register them on the blockchain.

Meanwhile, EY manages the end-to-end service. The company makes sure customers’ digital wallets are funded with enough Ether so there are no disruptions, publishes stories on behalf of publishers, provides analytics, and executes and displays search query results. Chen Zur, leader of EY’s US blockchain practice, described the solution as “notarization as a service”.

EY plans to add other services to the ANSAcheck solution. Giuseppe Perrone of EY said:

“The solution will become more sophisticated in terms of functionality and components, such as fact-checking, semantic language analysis and image data protection functions.”

In addition to ANSAcheck, there are other blockchain-enabled solutions implemented or in progress. Gartner estimates that by 2023, 30% of world news, including video, will rely on blockchain technologies for authentication. There will likely be more blockchain-enabled solutions that provide services such as establishing the authenticity of content, tracking the provenance of content over time, blacklisting impostors, spotting deepfakes (content manipulated by artificial intelligence) and linking digital content. to the physical world, for example, by marking the GPS location of a photo. De Alessandri welcomes these solutions, saying: “We were the first in Italy, but we don’t want to be the only ones who adopt”. He also added:

“The value comes to readers, editors and journalists when everyone adopts a solution like this. Any tool to defend and broaden professional information is beneficial to democracy “.

Disclosure: EY has been on the Executive Advisory Board of the Blockchain Center of Excellence since 2019 and is an active participant in University of Arkansas blockchain research and events.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed herein are solely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.