While warning that blockchain and distributed ledger technologies are not a panacea, an article in the Harvard Business Review argues that these technologies do have the potential to address many of the risks and root causes of disinformation.
Kathryn Harrison and Amelia Leopold argue that blockchain can be used to combat disinformation by tracking and verifying sources and other critical information for online media. The authors say that publications can use blockchain to create a registry of all the images they have published, making information such as captions, locations, consent to be photographed, copyright ownership, and other metadata verifiable by anyone.
They go on to give examples of how publications such as the New York Times whose News Provenance Project uses blockchain to track metadata such as sources and edits for news photos, providing readers with greater context and transparency into when and how content was created. And similarly, a photo and video authentication company called Truepic notarises content on the blockchains of Bitcoin and Ethereum, to establish a chain of custody from capture to storage.
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