The coronavirus that started in Wuhan, China late last year has claimed more than 700 lives and infected more than 35,000 people. As if this full-blown global health emergency weren’t scary enough, there’s another matter making the situation even worse: a tidal wave of misinformation washing over social media.
As Bloomberg recently reported, coronavirus falsehoods have ranged from racist to absurd and potentially lethal. Twitter has become a home for racist memes vilifying people of Chinese origin and even Asians of different lineage. Meanwhile, there are conspiracy theorists on Reddit claiming that drinking bleach could protect against the virus, or even cure it. (We’re not linking to these posts, to avoid further spreading such propaganda.)
The coronavirus misinformation campaign is merely the latest example of the global problem that is rushed, dishonest, and biased news.
Rushed news comes from media organizations’ obsession with being first. Thanks to 24-hour news cycles, social media, and mobile devices, news-gathering outlets often report stories before they can properly vet them.
Dishonest news comes from trolls, conspiracy theorists, and other bad actors who seek to spread disinformation for nefarious reasons. Those reasons can include political persuasion, corporate manipulation, financial scams, and more.
Biased news comes from privately-held media organizations with vested interests in promoting stories that titillate their target audiences and beef up their bottom line. Government interference and censorship are also frequent causes of biased news, particularly under authoritarian regimes.
A few news organizations are slowly starting to take action in an attempt to combat these problems. That includes the New York Times.
Last year, the Times launched its “News Provenance Project”. The project’s goal is to build a private and permissioned distributed database, in an effort to prove the authenticity of images used in journalism.
The Times has acknowledged that this project is in its infancy. For now, it’s merely conducting trials to see if the technology works. It’s attempting to build a blockchain solution that’s truly immutable, a plan that doesn’t always work out. Moreover, the Times project focuses only on images, leaving other forms of information unaccounted for.
Meanwhile, another entity has been hard at work addressing the goals of media transparency and accuracy, reaching a far more advanced stage than the Times and other media companies have thus far. The platform that’s making that possible is Trusted Voices, a co-venture of Emerge and its partner company, Penta.
Launched in February 2019, Trusted Voices uses blockchain technology to track source material, creating a chain of custody from the device used to capture content to its usage on various media platforms. Trusted Voices connects news media consumers directly with the people whose experiences are the foundation of the stories we see and hear in the news.
Emerge Founder/CEO Lucia Gallardo and Penta CEO David Ritter hatched, developed, and deployed the idea for Trusted Voices during a 2018 trip to Tijuana, Mexico.
Tijuana was the border town where a huge caravan of Central American migrants had gathered, hoping to gain entry into the United States. During their time there, Gallardo and Ritter met journalists who admitted they were looking for specific stories and filming footage to suit their predefined narratives. They also met migrants who were hesitant to tell their stories because they were concerned at how they were being politicized abroad.
Every night when they returned to their hotel, Gallardo and Ritter would watch the news and see the negative effects of those biases and filters. They watched in horror as stories about the migrant caravan flickered on screen that were either untrue or grossly exaggerated.
To combat these biases and filters, Gallardo and Ritter spent days talking to dozens of migrants who’d made the long and dangerous trek to the Mexico/U.S. border. They wanted to hear the migrants’ stories first-hand, without any filter or spin by third parties. The result was a treasure trove of information, which Emerge and Penta stored and secured through cutting-edge blockchain technology.
The Tijuana trip proved to be a successful pilot project for Trusted Voices. Since then, Emerge and Penta have grown a platform that not only authenticates images, but also stories in whatever form they are told.
Emerge and Penta are now scaling Trusted Voices, with multiple different users in mind. Those users include media companies looking to provide their audiences with verified source material; academic and scientific researchers aiming to protect their work; filmmakers seeking to protect films from being pirated; and whistleblowers, witnesses, and other vulnerable parties wanting to convey information securely and anonymously.
It’s difficult to know whether information in the news media and on social media is reliable, unbiased, and from trusted sources. Emerge and Penta believe that trusted information custody can erase such doubts, contributing to social justice by delivering greater transparency in how information is collected, dispersed, and used. When information is delivered in a reliable and unbiased way, everyone benefits.
As coronavirus rises to the level of global health epidemic and carries the threat of becoming a full-on pandemic, everyone from health professionals to heads of state will need to marshal their resources. At the same time, information accuracy will help both those policy makers and ordinary citizens make smart decisions to fight the threat.
As we at Trusted Voices like to say, How we tell stories matters. Now more than ever.
