Getting the story straight: Blockchain to curb fake news

Fake news - the deliberate spreading of verifiably false information under the disguise of being an authentic news story ­- not only undermines the public's confidence in the free press, it inflames social conflict, can result in health hazards, gives rise to radicalism, undermines the integrity of elections, and manipulates markets.

ANSAcheck authenticates the source of a news story and guarantees "The story came from ANSA.".

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.

Readers can click on the ANSACheck sticker to query the blockchain about the source of the story.

The story headline is "Johnson, I still have a fever, I am staying isolated" and the unique story ID is "5b456347bf699bb9807b742e132c9120." This story was created on April 3, 2020 and the Block ID is "AC202004031330."

In the above image, users can see where the story is stored on the Ethereum blockchain.

The story was added to Ethereum block number 9799299 on April 3, 2020 at 01:34:26 UTC. The unique transaction hash is "0xadc600195857be4f138b1a15b400ee4adf799cae462e3d6abaf1ecca8c52928d." By pressing the verify button on the console, the application performs a real-time verification of the story.

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.

ANSA stories usually come in the news feed before they are launched on the website, giving EY time to register them on the blockchain.