Two of the key characteristics of blockchain technology are trust and immutability. Although the technology comes with a variety of features – a list that is still being expanded as developers and mathematicians explore the limits of engineering and their imagination – it is these two that are both at the very core of the technology and provide so much potential.

After the initial shock of the 2016 referendum and the consecutive US presidential elections, Europeans woke up to the reality of a post-truth world. Social media has grown in significance and can now amplify the voice of an individual to a level never before seen in human history. Now, we can argue that the right to practise free speech is at the foundation of our democracies, but how do we react when we see it being used to spread misinformation?

Brexit 2019: How To Protect European Union Citizens

Whether this is an act of foreign interference, or simply the result of the polarisation of our political landscape, the result is a loss of trust in the media, our institutions, and eventually our democratic process.

The production of fake news relies on factual information being completely or partially doctored or taken out of context in a manner that creates a strawman or other logical fallacy.

We, at dGen understand that software will not save the world, and don’t expect blockchain to eradicate fake news entirely. But we recognise that this technology could help solve some of the issues, by utilising two of its core strengths: immutability and trust.

What Can We Learn From Brexit?

dGen’s recent report critically analyses the effect of fake news on the 2016 UK Referendum, known as Brexit, to discern lessons and develop solutions to protect EU citizens from fake news. dGen recommends a system that combines civic education and decentralisation to identify and combat the spread of fake news. Brexit has taught EU citizens at large valuable lessons about the state of politics, the spread of information, and just how technology can be used today to both misinform and protect the general public.

With 87% of Parliament members using Twitter and journalist/news outlets relying more heavily on Twitter and other social media networks to reach their constituents and audiences directly, many feel that this is what could be called a post factual society. dGen aims to have conversations around the use of technology as a tool to mitigate the spread of fake news, while also ensuring we keep free press as a cornerstone of modern democracies.

Although the gap between public perception and empirical reality is recognized, conversations around the responsible use of technology where truth and lies can be compared for public benefit should be of the highest priority moving forward.  If fake news is able to continue to flourish, this not only affects our political due processes, but also has dire consequences on global health and science, as identified in the report.

Fake News in Europe

In the case of the UK Referendum, the main influences of fake news were found to be enhanced by extensive use of bot networks. Political groups that strategically generated the most activity on a balanced range of political issues tended to have the most impact.  Bias in media coverage was also evident, represented particularly by the BBC’s anti-Brexit stance, which prevented the public from receiving balanced opinions and facts.

The negative effects of fake news on European political reporting were concerning, with some nations using the media to disseminate fake news that aimed to destroy national democracies and to weaken links between them. dGen’s research also found that the extraordinary effect of false information on health was a consequence of individuals failing to validate the information they read on the internet by cross-referencing claims.

By appraising potential blockchain solutions to eliminate fake news, and investigating a civic initiative that seeks to educate the public on how to check facts for their authenticity, a new model for eliminating fake news is suggested that combines these concepts to create new business models for news & media outlets, digital publishers, researchers, independent journalists, social media companies and fact checking organisations.

Blockchain Solutions

The major advantages of blockchain are transparency, cryptographic security, decentralisation, and immutability, which means that the block cannot be altered after it has been validated. This is a very important feature in terms of authentic news items being mimicked and presented as established media. To start, it is recommended that journalist/authors are given the opportunity to establish provenance of their work as well as facilitate secure transmission methods and archiving to establish a chain of trusted interactions.

Since documents are decentralised and preserved, it ensures that the authenticity of the originals can be traced, giving consumers a secure history to check their sources against. This system can also be used for the reduction of false statements in research findings associated with scientific papers, particularly those associated with open source journals, as it provides a means of references and citations that cannot be corrupted.

Next dGen recommends moving away from the advertising based model the internet and media outlets operate under currently to one where author, publisher, and public interact directly and are incentivised for these interactions and contributions of content. Paid advertising has the disadvantage that the advertiser may require certain opinions to be published. In the proposed system, content is decentralised to avoid censorship by running it on top of a peer-to-peer network, one of the underlying principles of blockchain technology.

This security built-in helps both publishers and readers maintain authenticity and veracity, which partially mitigates fake news. This idea would then somewhat replicate the way that traditional newspapers are partly funded by readers purchasing the publication, by basing the revenue model on agreements to pay for better articles. Blockchain enabled media outlets would be the vehicle to support these models, and have the capacity to keep a permanent record of all newsworthy events in the distributed ledger, for both the benefit of the journalist and future research studies.

Interactive journalism could further be employed giving paying customers smart keys to interact with the journalists and to express their views on articles or suggest new subjects, directly. Reader loyalty could be further enhanced by incentivising readers to contribute news items by offering some form of compensation, for instance a cryptocurrency.  Finally, in this approach machine learning could be utilised by analysing previous reports to form part of the authenticity system, giving the ability to analyse natural language and put warnings of fake news on content the process deems to be non factual.

In this research 3 main variations of fake news were identified.

• All content was fake
• The title was fake but the remainder valid
• Title real but content all false

A natural language processor identifies the first two types by judging the alignment between title and content, while the third is more difficult to analyse. This is due largely to personal opinion and emotions that separate hard news from soft news.

To tackle the problem of identifying the level of inaccuracy of an article, Artificial Intelligence (AI) models are used to detect these features and rank the article based on the degree of fact using a probabilistic validity scale; high scores indicate high fact articles, but are then further scrutinised for fact patterns that will indicate actual or false features.

Instead of using humans to validate articles, which would be extremely labor intensive, blockchain allows for a performance ledger of the outcomes, and AI continuously updates the data hashed and referenced on the system. This system also invites publishers, users and validators to contribute to diminishing the degree of fake news in the media and incentivise them to do so.

Blockchain In Use

Reputable established news outlets are already experimenting with blockchain to eliminate fake news from their published reports, such as the New York Times and its partner companies, which began to implement the proof of work/concept in July 2019 and are trialling it until December 2019 in an attempt to enhance trust in digital archives.

The company has begun to use blockchain to encrypt photographs and videos with details of the date, time, and location of their origin, as well as how they were edited and published. When these videos or photographs are displayed on other digital news sites, group chats, or identified by means of search engines, a set of signals can reveal its presence.

By combining machine learning and blockchain to enable the public to test the veracity of news stories. This system can be used in 3 ways:

• Users can validate the content of a news article by acting as validators or voters
• Publishers can add their content
• The news consumer can check the truthfulness of the content for a variety of purposes

The Present and Future

As the dGen report shows, the development in the dissemination of fake news has been accelerated by technology, misinformation is not a new phenomenon, however, with the internet dGen have determined citizens, organisations, and governments must be especially vigilant and educated to determine whether the information they receive and spread is factual.

As a note about the present, dGen confirms their research is by no means exhaustive, the current scenarios in which misinformation is spread are changing as fast as the underlying technologies used to spread it. For the future, further research will need to be performed as technologies mature, dGen anticipates the maturity of artificial intelligence, video manipulation to create what several have coined deep fakes, even the rise of voice activated devices in our homes could become a future source for scrutiny.

Through civic education and decentralisation dGen hopes respect for truth and evidence in our democracies is rebuilt. The internet is an important tool in everyday life; we use it to consume media, to learn, and to communicate among other things. To further delve into the lessons learned from Brexit and how to protect and educate yourself whether you are an EU citizen or a citizen of any nation, you can find the full report at https://read.dgen.org/brexit

About dGen

After Gen X, characterised by big societal shifts, Gen Y, better known as millennials, and the digital native Gen Z, the decentralised generation will grow up in a future shaped by different dynamics and technological developments. AI, blockchain technology, and IoT will individually bring disruption to many industries, but it’s at the crossroads where we expect our whole socio-economic fabric to change.

dGen is a not-for-profit think tank based in Berlin, Germany. We focus on how blockchain technology can contribute to a decentralized future in Europe and what this might mean for people, society, private entities, and the public sector over the coming decades.

Emerging technology focused on decentralising society will shape the next part of the twenty-first century; The dGen will grow up with opportunities for borders to fade and traditional networks to dissipate. Meanwhile, most blockchain developments are still in the early stages; focusing on building solid products and exploring regulatory requirements to create a fertile yet safe environment for companies and investors.

The industry is focused on solving the big topics right now, while we encounter a lot of great ideas in the blockchain community about adoption. It’s time for those ideas to find a purpose and for the real decision-makers in the world to learn what decentralisation will mean for them.

dGen is working with a team of researchers exploring how decentralisation will shape our future. Our insight reports focus on specific topics and industries to drive ideas for adoption in Europe. If you’re researching how decentralisation is shaping our future, and would like to get involved, please get in touch at dgen.org.

Contributors

Jake Stott

Before founding dGen, Jake was originally a partner at Signal Ventures, investing in blockchain tech. In late 2017 he founded hype partners to help build and nurture ecosystems for blockchain projects and has worked with many top 100 projects. With these combined experiences he is able to distinguish legitimacy, necessity, and nonsense in this space.

Nick Dijkstra

One of the founders of dGen and with a rich background in tech, Nick knows how to build organisations from scratch and can transform ideas to great tech products. As a former Product Manager at LiveIntent and Director of Customer Success at Avari he shipped software to a user base over 15% of the US population and has organised 200+ events in Berlin. As the COO at hype partners, he is currently helping top-tier blockchain firms strategise their market approach.

Tristan Littlejohn

Tristan’s work as an entrepreneur and founder lets him experiment with the ways we shape our systems for the future which are economically beneficial, socially responsible and create greater social impact.

Maggie Clarendon

Maggie is a writer, researcher, and editor. Trained in literature, critical theory, and gender studies, they are now exploring the ways that technology is changing the landscape of human interaction.

Harshitha Ravindran

Harshitha – a Bachelor of Psychology, currently doing Masters’ in Business Psychology in Berlin – is an intern at dGen. She is currently doing Market Research, helping out with Marketing and Branding.

See more Brexit stories here.