BLOCKCHAIN-POWERED DEFENSE AGAINST FAKE NEWS

Abstract

The rise of fake news, disinformation campaigns, and deep fakes has led to a crisis of 
trust in digital content. This project proposes leveraging distributed ledger 
technologies (DLTs) and blockchain to develop a robust system to counter digital 
deception and authenticate content. The focus lies in creating a decentralized, tamper- 
proof infrastructure to verify the authenticity of information in the digital realm. The 
rise of ubiquitous deepfakes, misinformation, disinformation, and post-truth, often 
referred to as fake news, raises concerns over the role of the Internet and social media 
in modern democratic societies. Due to its rapid and widespread diffusion, digital 
deception has not only an individual or societal cost, but it can lead to significant 
economic losses or to risks to national security. Blockchain and other distributed 
ledger technologies (DLTs) guarantee the provenance and traceability of data by 
providing a transparent, immutable, and verifiable record of transactions while 
creating a peer-to-peer secure platform for storing and exchanging information. This 
overview aims to explore the potential of DLTs to combat digital deception, 
describing the most relevant applications and identifying their main open challenges. 
Moreover, some recommendations are enumerated to guide future researchers on 
issues that will have to be tackled to strengthen the resilience against cyber-threats on 
today's online media.