Blockchain to Tackle Fake News

Steven Zenios04/12/20193min
A recent report from Gartner has revealed a future use of blockchain technology in the form of being used to tackle fake news.

Avivah Litan, a Gartner vice president of research and co-author of the “Predicts 2020: Blockchain Technology” report, by 2023 30% of world news and video will be verified as trustworthy by blockchain ledgers.

This development will be vital as currently, news on social media on platforms such as Facebook and Google News are used and manipulated to influence public opinion for important decisions such as government elections.

Due to the enticing headlines, fake news often attracts more attention than factual news. One example, the top 20 fake news stories about the 2016 U.S. presidential election received more engagement on Facebook than the top 20 election stories from 19 major media outlets, according to one study.

Litan commented

AI models that support text writing and video production can be used to rapidly disseminate customized and highly believable fake content that serves as the new breed of cyber weapons,

Adding,

Tracking assets and proving provenance are two key successful use cases for permission blockchain and can be readily applied to tracking the provenance of news content.

Work has already begun to tackle the fake news. In August DARPA, U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency started on developing technology that can find and identify fake news amongst over 500,000 stories, photos, video, and audio clips.

Facebook has also begun to tackle the problem as in September Facebook created an industry group that specifically design tools that detect fake news. Facebook’s Partnership on AI includes Microsoft Amazon, Google, DeepMind, and IBM, as well as academics from Oxford, MIT, Cornell Tech, UC Berkeley and other schools.

If these efforts are successful platforms that feature the fake news will be able to “blacklist” and block the content.

Litan wrote,

Blockchain technology is proven to excel at supporting this use case as it enables a ‘shared single version of truth’ across multiple entities based on immutable data and audit trails.

The use of blockchain to verify news sources has already begun. The New York Times is one of the first news distributors to trial the use of blockchain to verify the source of photographs and video content, according to Gartner. The technology keeps a record of who took the picture or video and how and when it was edited and published.

 

Image source by The Forward

Steven Zenios

Steven Zenios is a young author and designer with strong passion. A specialist in web design and development, blogger, author and Blockchain entrepreneur. He is the CEO of Web Theoria, a digital agency based in Cyprus. In the last 10 years, he has vastly improved his knowledge and skills to produce great pieces of work, both in the web design industry and article/blog industry. Contact Steven at +357-22029786 ext: 6120 or by email at [email protected] for editorial related questions.



About us

High Worth Citizen is all about delivering the latest business news on finance, investment, real estate and wealth. Our readers are the rich and powerful, their associates and business partners, the global High Net Worth Individuals.


CONTACT US