Getting the story straight: Blockchain to curb fake news
Rather than responding to existing fake news, this solution prevents imposters, a type of fake news story that appears to be from a legitimate news agency.
The ANSAcheck project started in 2019. Giuseppe Perrone, the head of EY’s blockchain initiatives in the Mediterranean, served as EY’s leader. The ANSAcheck solution works by assigning a unique hash ID to every ANSA-created news story and posting the hash to Ethereum, the world’s largest public blockchain platform. If even one letter in the story is changed, the system will detect that it is not an identical copy to the original story. Story IDs are batched and posted multiple times each day to Ethereum. If ANSA updates the story, another entry is recorded on the blockchain and linked back to the original entry to form a chain of provenance.
When users click on the ANSAcheck sticker, the console viewer displays the transaction details on the blockchain.
More recently, EY was batching roughly 500–600 new stories every six hours, so the cost per transaction dropped to around $0.006 per story. Ethereum costs drove the decision to reduce the time of notarization.
Mary Lacity is a Walton professor of information systems and the director of the Blockchain Center of Excellence at the University of Arkansas.
See the full story here: https://cointelegraph.com/news/getting-the-story-straight-blockchain-to-curb-fake-news
See the background story on Ansa from April, 2020, "ANSA leveraging blockchain technology to help readers check source of news," here: https://www.ansa.it/english/news/science_tecnology/2020/04/06/ansa-using-blockchain-to-help-readers_af820b4f-0947-439b-843e-52e114f53318.html