How blockchain can help the fight against fake news

I know, I know— almost all posts and talks are trying to convince you that this technology is something magical that will solve all possible problems. But if we take the fundamental properties of blockchain,enforcing trust between parties that do not trust each other, forget for a minute about crypto-currencies, then, definitely, there are cases where blockchain is the tool for the job.

Because I respect your intelligence , I will not try to give a definition of fake news, nether will explain why they are harmful, but before that, lets ask how the fake news spread. Trolls and AI backed by some organization or even governments is the traditional answer, but this are possible sources, not the medium in which fake news propagate. The medium is humans, or to be more precise, humans desires, anger, hate and regret. People always will believe in “news” that resonate with there internal, irrational, some times even absurd belies. You hate a popular person and internally you want something bad to happen to him? How you will react when you see a “news” about the arrest of this person because of some illegal activity? This is the core of the problem, social medias, with the attitude that every opinion worth the same, are just the catalyst. And yes, blockchain cannot help to “fix” human psychology. Blockchain can help by lowering the strength of this catalyst.

So what are possible solutions? One is all news to be “approved” by some authority, and yes, you are right, this is terrible idea. Censorship may be very effective, but will cause a lot of undesirable side effects.

The other solution do not require censorship, it require a mechanism that can prove the origin of a news. Just that, nothing more. So how this may work?

Lets assume that there is a blockchain (no crypto, no coins) on which major news agencies register the news that they will stream to there associates and partners, and every news receive a unique ID, generated by the blockchain and associated with this particular news, and this ID is added to the news itself. If is in digital form, a header that is not visible by humans, but readable by computers can be used, and if is printed, the ID can be printed in the footer. This types of headers are commonly used now, and there implementation is more than trivial.

Every one can verify the origin and validity of the news and decide did he/she trust this source, if he/she wants to. Because the ID can be read by computers a browser extensions can be developed that will do this check automatically and give some easy visual feedback for the user about the source, validity or similar characteristics. Also this extension can add functionality for customization, personal preferences or even personal rating. In some systems will be possible unverified news to be completely hidden, but this will be because user decide so, not because some central authority have flexible definition of fake news. This is not “user rated” content, this just a tool to track the source of the news.

Registration of the news is completely optional. Serious professional news agency will have incentive to register there news, those that will generate fake news will not do it, because very fast, even without the need of big data analysis, will be clear, that this agency is not a news agency, and then actions can be taken. In many countries there are very serous laws against fake news.

So serious and respectful agencies will mark the news and will ask there partners and associates also to redistribute them. Fake news will not. All parties that are sharing and distributing the news will want to add this ID, because without the ID the news will reach few people, and the people, in general, will be more than happy to limit the amount of “click bytes” and fake news in there stream.

But how this will help against trolls that are putting fake information in specific groups of people? It will stop the spread, the news will stay in so called “echo chambers”.

Also, this process do not discriminate about the size of the organization. Small regional agencies will have same access and functionality as big ones, no additional cost is required, and this process is trivial for technical implementation.

But what if someone is using couple of news to create an analysis or similar? He/she can add IDs of the news used and generate a new ID.

But what if social medias start using this IDs for censorship or targeting? What prevent them to do it now? The concept of this approach is to allow the users to decide for themselves, not someone else to decide for users.

What if someone is distributing a fake news but is using ID for a real proven news? The ID is associated with the actual news, with the actual text. Semantic comparison of two texts is easy, even for computers.

But people with reason are able to decide for themselves, what is the difference? It is simple:

If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth — Joseph Goebbels

There is no way to prevent irrational people for stop taking irrational actions, but there is a way to help rational people to stay rational — by allowing them to check the information.

The actual technical realization of the project is not so complicated, because blockchain is distributed by design, nodes can be hosted by any interested party, NGOs, news agencies, social medias and individuals. There are many platforms that can be used, Hyperledger Fabric is one of them. Ethereum is not suitable, because of scalability issues, limitations of the data that can be put inside and associated costs of storing data.

Will this works? Yes, if news agencies and individuals wants something to change. It this is not the case, then additional incentives must be added by the governments, but this is a very slippery road.