Verizon Full Transparency Project: Combating Fake News with AliceNet
Can the AliceNet blockchain be used to fight against the ever-growing problem of fake news? Yes! A newsroom can put all their news releases on the blockchain, which then documents all text changes — from minor linguistic edits to statistical updates — with all details timestamped and easily verifiable. For their Full Transparency project, Verizon leveraged our technology to secure their corporate communications, allowing for verifiable sub-quoting and trace revisions.
Customer Challenge
Customer Challenge - The purpose of the Full Transparency project was to investigate how digital media can be secured against manipulation via auditable records stored in blockchains. Verizon, USA’s largest wireless mobile carrier, was on the lookout for a solution to secure the corporate communications of their News Center so that all information could be audited by external parties through revision control tracing and long-term access to their original content.
Migrating Verizon’s News Center to AliceNet
By migrating Verizon’s Newsroom to the AliceNet blockchain, we were able to achieve non-repudiation and data integrity guarantees. This means that Verizon could not alter the history of what had been said in their media center without such changes being evident, including both changes in information and omission of information. Readers were enabled to see the exact context in which media was originally presented as well as any revisions to the content in chronological order. In application, every time Verizon publishes or changes text in an official news release, all details are recorded and stored with their own unique hash code. Each new hash securely fastens itself to the previous block and becomes a permanent part of the chain. Cryptographic signatures of all block codes are interlocked, making the chain secure.
How AliceNet Revolutionizes the Fight Against Fake News
AliceNet's blockchain technology has the potential to revolutionize the way we combat fake news by providing non-repudiation and data integrity guarantees. While the technology has not yet been fully leveraged, the possibilities for deployment at scale are endless. Going beyond tracking first-party changes, AliceNet enables the tracking of third-party changes, which is essentially tracking how journalists or editors use source material.
