2019 Necker Blockchain Summit —Blocking Fake News
By: The Bitfury Group
Tags: Bitfury, Leadership, Bitcoin, Blockchain Summit

There are two ways to look at the intersection of blockchain and journalism – where blockchain can help address the issues of trust and misinformation, as well as how the technology can improve the business processes for the content creators and give data control back to the consumers.

These are just a few of the topics our panel, “Blocking Fake News” tackled today at the Blockchain Summit with Michael del Castillo from Forbes, Emily Parker from Longhash, cohost Sandra Ro from the Global Blockchain Business Council (GBBC) and Caitlin Long from the Wyoming Blockchain Coalition. The panel was led by Bitfury CCO John Mercurio.

Blockchain, even in its most basic form, has features that help certify truth and protect media of any kind (videos, print stories, etc.) from manipulation – by saving it to a blockchain’s immutable record. Ro is already pushing this forward with Jane King in their Business of Blockchain Series at NASDAQ.

“What we’ve decided to do with the GBBC to combat fake news is in the verification process,” said Ro. “We [the GBBC] look at the video, verify that it’s the original content and we’re hashing it to the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains. It’s a small step – its literally just putting a badge on a specific video. It’s a first step, it’s just being able to prove something is real.”

But del Castillo said he is “very skeptical and sometimes even occasionally concerned about how we flippantly throw around concepts like behavior modification and incentivizing behavior.”

“It concerns me that the state of truth is such in today’s society that we are looking for ways to incentivize, to consume truth through a technology,” he added.

Ro countered the GBBC’s new project is an important part of validating and verifying content. “You don’t need to believe me. You don’t even need to believe Jane King. You just go to the public blockchain and there it is. To me, that is a third-party validation that might not change the world, but it does help with time-stamping original content.”

That verification/timestamping process can go even further to individuals who want to have more control over their public persona. Long sees a future where public personalities like politicians self-verify their statements.

“One of the biggest problems in this space is impersonation,” said Caitlin, referring to the frequent social media scams where bots impersonate crypto personalities to get money. “Social media platforms are just not willing to go through any identity verification process. And when we see the deepfake videos that are coming out too, it’s really scary to be a public person. What I think will end up happening is that we’ll see some kind of verification when (politicians or public people) say something or share something.”

Emily Parker, from LongHash, shared her reservations about moving to a “badging” or verification system for statements of fact or truth. “Clearly media is pretty broken,” she said, “and I’m a little bit skeptical about how blockchain can solve some of these problems. For example, I don’t think the problem right now in the US is that people don’t have access to fact checking. They do. What’s to keep them from saying, “Oh, this is a fake news blockchain?”

She added, “Americans have different versions of reality. And until we address that we’re not going to get anywhere.”

But blockchain also has the capability to empower readers and consumers of media outside of breaking news – its decentralized nature could help consumers across all kinds of media. Del Castillo said, “What really gets me excited is the business models. That’s both from the advertising front and the platform front. I’m really excited about blockchain technologies that are being developed to remove 3rd party advertising and to connect readers with advertisers. Readers can have more say over what they’re seeing and control over how their info is being used.”

Blockchain can also help democratize access to news and information, he said. “I’m interested in seeing platforms that require less mediation from big media. The big play is connecting readers with the content makers and having less reliance on institutions that control most platforms.”