Beyond Fake News: Provenance’s Role in Crafting a Trustworthy Media Future

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OvertheBlock

12 min readNov 23, 2023

This article is the first issue of a collection stemming from a collaboration between Overtheblock.io and Numbers Protocol. The post highlights the role that Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) and Artificial Intelligence may play within the media & entertainment industry towards the attainment of more trustworthy information diffusion processes over social media.

TL;TR:

Today’s urgent concerns include the erosion of privacy and the manipulation of personal data. DLTs may help address these issues by ensuring digital media authenticity while protecting users’ privacy. Nevertheless, several challenges — from ethical dilemmas to technological barriers — hinder the widespread adoption of such solutions. A unified effort involving media organizations, tech sectors, and governments is crucial. Equally important are initiatives for media literacy and fostering responsible digital citizenship. While tools like DLTs may offer hope against misinformation, coordinated and informed actions are key to achieving transformative outcomes.

Introduction

In today’s world, where digital communication and social media reign supreme, the spread of misinformation and fake news is a concerning and widespread problem. The consequences of inaccurate or intentionally false information can be severe, eroding the trust in our information sources. Misinformation is not just a localized issue, but a worldwide challenge that affects millions of people, communities, and even democratic systems.

Misinformation can take different forms, including exaggerated headlines, false stories, manipulated images, and edited videos. It takes advantage of the easy accessibility of online platforms, spreading untrue narratives quickly. These false stories can shape people’s opinions, impact election results, and even lead to real-life violence. Recent events have shown us the serious consequences of fake news.

1.1 The Role of Misinformation in Political Polarization

Misinformation plays a significant role in exacerbating political polarization across many countries. Social media platforms have become hotspots for echo chambers, where users are only exposed to content that reinforces their preexisting beliefs, leading to the entrenchment of their views.

The United States presidential election conducted in 2016 serves as a prime illustration of this phenomenon. Various misleading stories and conspiracy theories circulated on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, causing conflict and widening the gap between citizens.

Fig. 1 Analysis of the Prevalence and Concentration of Fake News Sources Over Time [Source ]

Fig. 1 shows an analysis of the prevalence and concentration of fake news over time. More specifically:

Graph A presents the daily percentage of exposures to black, red, and orange-labelled fake news sources, compared to all exposures to political URLs. In graphs B to D, instead, exposures were aggregated across all panel members, illustrating:

(B) The distribution of exposures across websites.
(C) The distribution of shares among panel members.
(D) The distribution of exposures among panel members.

On the x-axis, we see the percentage of websites or panel members responsible for a certain percentage (depicted on the y-axis) of all exposures or shares. The black, red, and orange lines represent fake news sources, while the blue line indicates all other sources. It’s important to note that the distribution in (B) isn’t directly comparable due to the greater number of sources in its tail and the fundamentally different selection process involved.

The graphs in Fig 2? [are these the graphs the sentence is referring to?] illustrate a significant increase in the sharing of fake news stories on Facebook during the 2016 US presidential election. This indicates that misinformation contributed to political polarization during this period.

Fig.2 Fake news stories on Facebook during 2016 elections (source)

According to these charts, most false news articles circulated on Facebook during the 2016 US presidential election favoured Donald Trump. This implies that spreading inaccurate information may have influenced the election outcome in Trump’s favour. These visuals serve as evidence that misinformation can intensify political division, and by analyzing the data, we can gain insight into how it spreads and its impact on people’s beliefs.

The COVID-19 pandemic was made even more challenging by the infodemic, which involved a flood of false information about the virus. Rumours, unverified remedies, and conspiracy theories spread rapidly, causing confusion and posing a serious threat to public health. Some individuals followed misguided advice instead of official guidance, which further exacerbated the situation.

1.2 The Erosion of Privacy and the Emergence of Digital Manipulation

In today’s digital age, the once-valued concept of privacy is under threat due to the rise of social media platforms and internet networks. These platforms frequently collect vast amounts of personal data without the knowledge or explicit consent of users. This data serves not just for bespoke marketing strategies but can be harnessed for more insidious purposes, potentially undermining the very tenets of our democratic processes.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal stands as a stark reminder of these privacy concerns. Without consent, Facebook profiles of 50 million users were harvested. This data was subsequently used to construct a sophisticated algorithm aimed at swaying political opinions. Christopher Wylie, a whistleblower from Cambridge Analytica, revealed how they exploited these profiles to mould perceptions and behaviours. This misuse of personal data has the potential to significantly sway the outcomes of elections and referendums, thereby putting the very integrity of democratic processes at risk.

Further exacerbating privacy concerns is the strategy of microtargeting. This involves tailoring content and ads to specific individuals based on their online behaviour and personal data. While this technique is a boon for advertisers, it can also be weaponized to skew public perception. The majority of users remain oblivious to this level of surveillance, making them susceptible to potential manipulation.

1.3 The Imperative of Trust Restoration

Amidst an information ecosystem riddled with misinformation, media distrust, and breaches of data privacy, the restoration of trust emerges as a paramount concern. Trust underpins informed decisions, constructive civic engagement, and the very fabric of democracy. As trust dwindles, individuals begin to question the authenticity of news sources, the content on social media, and the veracity of daily information.

A deficit of trust can have catastrophic effects on democratic systems. This erosion of confidence causes individuals to question election outcomes, political messages, and even the intentions of candidates. The propagation of false narratives with the aim of influencing public perception threatens the equity of elections. Addressing this trust deficit becomes imperative to preserve the sanctity of democratic procedures.

Trust is essential not only in politics but also in other areas like health, science, and finance. False information can have severe consequences like people being misled into making unhealthy decisions or falling prey to financial fraud. The impact of losing trust is vast, affecting individuals, communities, and societies as a whole.

1.4 Established Pathways in Media Credibility

There are several tools readily available striving for media authenticity :

Deepware Scanner: This tool leverages AI to detect deepfakes, which are advanced manipulated videos. By identifying subtle inconsistencies not visible to the human eye, it helps discern genuine content from manipulated ones.
Browser extension for fact-checking: These tools provide real-time ratings for the credibility of websites and news articles directly in the user’s browser. Examples: NewsGuard, Media Bias/Fact Check.
Fact-checking Platforms: These platforms are dedicated to verifying the authenticity of news stories, helping readers discern fact from fiction in an era of rampant misinformation. Examples: Snopes, FactCheck.org.

1.5 The Emergence of Web 3.0 Solution

The decentralized landscape of Web 3.0 offers a fresh set of tools tailored to ensure media authenticity and credibility :

Civic: Civic uses blockchain for identity verification. While it’s primarily geared towards ID verification, its application ensures that individuals behind specific statements or claims can be authenticated.
Decentralized Data Access with The Graph: Any application relying on The Graph for data can provide complete traceability for its claims. Readers or viewers can trace back and validate the origins of a data point. This level of transparency ensures that data isn’t manipulated or taken out of context.
Numbers Protocol: Standing out within the Web 3.0 domain, Numbers Protocol integrates the strengths of blockchain, cryptography, and AI to safeguard media content’s integrity.

The remainder of the article will discuss a critical issue and introduce a potential solution called provenance. Provenance, which operates within the context of Web3 and blockchain technology, offers a promising way to combat misinformation and restore trust in media. At the core of this solution is Numbers Protocol, a decentralized blockchain platform that aims to protect the authenticity of digital media.

Throughout the following sections, we will explore how provenance, supported by Numbers Protocol, can enable individuals, organizations, and societies to verify the credibility of media content, safeguard user privacy, and maintain the integrity of information. This article aims to shed light on the complex issue of misinformation and to demonstrate how blockchain technology, cryptography, and artificial intelligence can provide a research-backed solution for a world grappling with the consequences of a post-truth era.

Towards Restoring Trust: Provenance and the Web3 Landscape

In the battle against misinformation and the urgent quest to rebuild trust in media, the concept of provenance emerges as a game-changer. Rooted in the Web3 and blockchain technology, provenance offers unparalleled transparency, traceability, and authenticity to media content, reshaping how we perceive and interact with digital information.

Provenance represents a groundbreaking strategy in the Web3 environment, aiming to ascertain the origin, history, and veracity of digital content. This system transcends conventional verification techniques by leveraging blockchain’s immutable nature coupled with cryptographic proofs. In essence, every media item’s genesis can be traced, ensuring a new level of transparency and reliability.

2.1 The Pillars of Provenance: Traceability, Transparency, and Authenticity

Traceability and Transparency: Provenance’s core strength is its ability to embed traceability and transparency into media content’s creation and distribution journey. Acting as an unalterable ledger, it documents each content phase, from its inception to publication. This capability reshapes the media realm by creating an atmosphere where every alteration is documented, promoting a culture of accountability and credibility.
Authenticity: In the current media landscape, discerning genuine content from fabrications remains daunting. Provenance, using cryptographic proofs and blockchain, allows users to validate news and media content’s authenticity, providing an indelible record, ensuring the content remains genuine and unaltered.
Combating Misinformation: Envision an environment where users, before trusting a viral news piece, can trace its roots, scrutinize the author’s credibility, check its alignment with reputable sources, and detect unauthorized changes. Provenance provides the tools for such critical evaluations, fortifying defenses against misinformation.

2.2 Advancing Provenance: Numbers Protocol’s Role in Authenticity

Delving into Provenance’s potential, Numbers Protocol stands out as an innovator in ensuring content authenticity. This decentralized blockchain platform combines blockchain, cryptography, and AI to protect the integrity of photos and videos.

The Cornerstones of Numbers Protocol:
Capture Process: This procedure logs detailed metadata of a photo or video, including creation time, camera specifics, and location, cementing the content’s origin.
Seal Process: This phase cryptographically binds the metadata to the media, creating a tamper-proof seal that ensures unquestionable authenticity.
Trace Process: It enables users to cross-check metadata against blockchain records, facilitating confident determinations of a content piece’s legitimacy.
Provenance System: This component records comprehensive ownership and usage histories of media, ensuring that each interaction with content is precisely documented.

By championing Provenance, Numbers Protocol heralds a renewed era of media authenticity. It is a beacon guiding users to differentiate truths from falsehoods, reinstating trust in the digital information world.

Amid escalating concerns about privacy diminution and data manipulation, Numbers Protocol arises as a prospective remedy within the Web3 and blockchain space. By leveraging blockchain’s inherent security attributes and cryptographic methods, Numbers Protocol endeavours to protect digital media’s authenticity and safeguard user privacy.

2.3 Case Study: The Cambridge Analytica Scandal

Data Security: Numbers Protocol adopts sturdy cryptographic methods, ensuring user data protection against unauthorized access.
User Control: It champions transparent and fixed consent mechanisms, ensuring users dictate their data terms, diminishing unauthorized data collection risks.
Data Integrity: Provides tools for users to ascertain data genuineness, battling misinformation.

Integrating Numbers Protocol can substantially alleviate the privacy and manipulation risks spotlighted.

2.4 Countering Microtargeting’s Privacy Concerns

Numbers Protocol offers a toolbox for users to reclaim their personal data control, considering microtargeting’s invasive nature.

Data Ownership: Numbers Protocol allows users to assert data ownership, challenging third parties from exploiting personal data without clear consent.
Accountability: With blockchain’s transparent nature, users can trace their data usage, ensuring misuse accountability.
Data Minimization: Promotes collecting only vital information, decreasing potential for invasive microtargeting.

Infusing Numbers Protocol into our digital world fortifies privacy and reduces manipulative microtargeting’s vulnerabilities, emphasizing the threats previously highlighted while bolstering user empowerment digitally.

Navigating the Provenance Terrain: Challenges and Ethical Quandaries

The journey through Provenance, while promising, isn’t without its share of thorns. Let’s explore some complexities and ethical mazes that intertwine with our pursuit of unadulterated media content.

Balancing Act — Transparency vs. Privacy: At provenance’s core lies an inherent challenge — ensuring exhaustive transparency while not jeopardizing user privacy. While its intent revolves around dismantling misinformation, ensuring this doesn’t come at the cost of compromising user confidentiality is vital.

Collecting metadata like content’s creation time, date, and location, fundamental for provenance, invariably poses questions regarding user consent and data rights. The pivotal task? Carving a middle ground where content transparency harmoniously coexists with user privacy protections.

Integration — A Herculean Task: Slotting in provenance tools, such as Numbers Protocol, within the intricate machinery of media corporations is no mean feat. Media institutions, spanning both digital and traditional spectrums, must rewire their operations to make space for these cutting-edge technologies. Such foundational shifts could spur resistance owing to the sheer magnitude of disruptions.

Facing the Industry Goliaths: Every industry carries the weight of its legacy, and the media sphere is no exception. The inertia of established behemoths can often pose formidable roadblocks. Convincing industry titans to embrace provenance, potentially asking them to loosen their grasp on control, is an uphill battle.

The Scalability Conundrum: Beneath provenance’s potential lurks the spectre of technological limitations. As digital media swells at an unprecedented rate, scalability looms as a significant concern. The existing blockchain infrastructure grapples with accommodating the daily deluge of data.

In Pursuit of Tech Evolution: Taming scalability concerns and other tech constraints demands relentless technological progression. The foundational technologies, such as blockchain and cryptography, must continually evolve to keep pace with a rapidly transforming media ecosystem. The silver lining is the tech community’s fervent endeavours in perfecting these tools for more robust scalability and finesse.

The Path Forward with Provenance

Tackling misinformation and ensuring authentic media content calls for a synergy of collaboration, education, and a commitment to rekindling trust in our informational resources.

Media isn’t a solo venture; reestablishing its trustworthiness requires the alliance of media outfits, tech enterprises, blockchain experts, and governing bodies.

Standardization: crafting industry-accepted standards for provenance to foster uniformity and cross-functionality.
Sharing best practices: media hubs sharing their provenance integration experiences and successful strategies.
Government involvement: a conducive regulatory milieu that champions media authenticity and transparency can be pivotal.

The decentralized fabric of blockchain, which is intrinsic to provenance and Numbers Protocol’s solution, minimizes centralized trust reliance, ushering in transparent and credible media realms.

4.1 The Centrality of Media Literacy

Media acumen encompasses vital proficiencies like:

Critical analysis: training individuals to astutely assess media, distinguishing credible sources from deceptive ones.
Source verification: equipping consumers with tools to authenticate news pieces, visuals, and multimedia.
Digital mastery: Sharpening skills to adeptly manoeuvre digital terrains and fathom the algorithms steering content prominence.
Civic participation: Amplifying active civic involvement by highlighting media’s democratic role and responsible info dissemination.
Awareness of manipulative techniques: unmasking tactics employed to sway opinions and actions.

Strategies for Augmenting Media Literacy

School curriculum: imbuing media acumen into school syllabi to groom young netizens for responsible digital engagement.
Community workshops: orchestrating community-centric seminars to enlighten adults and the elderly about media literacy.
Digital tools: offering easy-to-navigate online tools, such as fact-checkers and media literacy guides.
Joint ventures: teaming up with media agencies, tech firms, and societal organizations to champion media literacy drives.
Inclusivity: guaranteeing that media literacy campaigns cater to a diverse audience, spanning various demographics.

In this digital era, where information flux is ceaseless, being a discerning digital denizen isn’t just about vigilant media consumption but also nurturing a credible online realm. Fostering civil discourse, flagging deceptive content, and amplifying factual content are pivotal to digital citizenship.

Conclusion: The Prospective Brilliance of Provenance in Media

Provenance heralds a transformative phase in mitigating misinformation and rekindling media trust. With tools like blockchain, cryptography, and AI, it pledges transparency, traceability, and authenticity in media narratives. As we have dissected:

Misinformation, a formidable challenge in our digital epoch, has extensive societal ramifications.
Provenance, fortified by Web3 and the groundbreaking Numbers Protocol, can be our shield against misinformation, guaranteeing transparency and credibility.
Challenges abound — ethical conundrums, integration issues, and tech limitations need resolutions.
The power of stakeholder collaborations and media literacy can be our beacon in this fight against misinformation.

Provenance in media is a beacon of hope, but its realization demands collective effort and unwavering digital citizenship. As enlightened consumers and active info ecosystem contributors, we must champion genuine information sources and envision a transparent media future, underpinned by awareness, learning, and collective aspirations.

Please cite as: Galason, E., Yan S., (2023) Beyond Fake News: Provenance’s Role in Crafting a Trustworthy Media Future, Overtheblock Innovation Observatory, retrievable at link

OverTheBlock is a LINKS Foundation’s initiative carried out by a team of innovation researchers under the directorship of Enrico Ferro. The aim is to promote a broader awareness of the opportunities offered by the advent of exponential technologies in reshaping how we conduct business and govern society.