Blockchain brings trust back to media in the age of fakenews
Part I
By looking around at recent major media market and related startup events we have come to a conclusion:
Media is heading towards decentralization today.
A trend that we identified is manifested in the growing number of new companies using blockchain technology. And that made us at Reporter Community think.
Why Blockchain?
Because Blockchain is the new technology for trust. It provides immutable (remember this word, it’s the essence of blockchain) authenticity in the age of #fakenews. We see that blockchain will be a required technology in media.
Blockchain has the potential to change the way we buy and sell newsworthy contents, interact with publishers and verify the authenticity of the content along with its owner — almost everything what is relevant to make content valuable.
It combines the transparency of the internet with the security of cryptography to give all of us a faster way to verify key information and establish trust.
Establishing trust in media with blockchain
Blockchain was originally developed as a part of the digital currency Bitcoin. But blockchain doesn’t equal Bitcoin, they are not the same. Blockchain can support a wide range of applications. Blockchain is a record of transactions, like a traditional ledger. These transactions can be movement of money … but not just money! These can be goods, metadata of a media content or secure data of a copyright owner.
Let’s see a simple example:
As a copyright owner sells a story or content piece to a publisher, the information of this transaction (not the story itself) is recorded and shared with their computers on the blockchain. As each record of transaction is combined into a block, it is time stamped, and when a block is complete, it also gets its own time stamp and a cryptographic hash (complicated maths that makes virtually unbreakable links between the blocks). Finally, the completed block is sent out across the network, it’s appended to the chain.
In this process, every last block’s hash is added to the next block’s data, and so on throughout the chain. Any attempt to alter a previously created block will result in a different the hash than the one originally encoded in the next block, ensuring verification can be done throughout the entire blockchain. With this verification opportunity copyright ownership can simply be tracked for any newsworthy story or media content.
Where is the trust?
Blockchain is designed to store information in a way that makes it virtually impossible to modify (add or remove) data without being detected by other users. Today, contents — even stories, pictures, videos — are verified by a central authority like editors, or a group of employees at social media companies.
Blockchain applications could change these centralized mechanisms to a decentralized system, where verification — method used to counter manipulations or post modifications— comes from the consensus of multiple users.
Provided all participants have access to a copy of the entire blockchain, they can detect any tampering. When the hashes match up across the chain, all parties — including news agencies, publishers and media companies — know that they can trust their record.
Blockchain has two other important tools:
- One is the smart contract or application — they can facilitate, verify or enforce terms of contracts incl. the adherence to regulations — all of these terms are governed in a code.
- The second tool is the cryptographic keys. Data integrity is secured by the use of private keys (provided they are properly safeguarded).
While blockchain technology is relatively novel, its potential is enormous. Blockchain will transform our everyday transactions, because it’s capable to establish trust and able to provide a simple way to change ownership of almost any goods — even media contents.
Reporter Community amongst peers utilizing blockchain
We recognized that most of the new ventures in the media space are (or willing to be) using blockchain technology to guarantee content integrity, service quality and process transactions automatically.
In the second part of the article we will show a few companies and their working method & values based on their closed, ongoing and upcoming ICOs like Reporter Community, Trive, Decent, Synereo, Zloadr, Snip and Picter.
Check the next part of our article, and see why believe so strongly that today’s media is at the brink of decentralization, and the near future may result in tokenization of existing media businesses.
