In discussions about fake news, there is a moment that frequently comes up; most people are aware of it even if they are unable to identify it. A screenshot is shared by someone. The headline is frightening. In the corner is a respectable outlet’s logo. And ten thousand people have already seen the thing before anyone considers checking it. Even though the story never happened, the screenshot serves as proof.
The top wire service in Italy, ANSA, experienced precisely that in April 2020. On social media, three made-up stories bearing the ANSA logo went viral, each claiming to disclose the date on which the government would lift the nationwide lockdown. Government officials who wanted to know why a reputable company was publishing fiction personally called the agency’s CEO. It was nearly impossible to verify ANSA’s response, which was that they hadn’t.
Denying authorship is insufficient in the era of screenshots and shares, as the incident revealed, something the media industry had been silently putting up with for years. Lies spread quickly, but that’s not the only issue. It’s that the truth comes without a receipt.
The distributed ledger technology known for supporting cryptocurrencies, blockchain, has been used for years to solve issues for which it was not intended. Contract management, wine authentication, and supply chains. A few of those apps became stuck. Some didn’t. On closer inspection, however, the case for using it to combat misinformation becomes surprisingly clear because blockchain creates records that cannot be covertly altered, which is precisely what the media ecosystem currently lacks.
Every published story is automatically fed into a blockchain-based platform as soon as an editor hits publish thanks to a system developed by ANSA in collaboration with EY. What the project refers to as “notarization” is the process by which each article is given a time-stamped, cryptographically secured entry that tracks the narrative from its inception through each update and repost. Any ANSA story has a small icon that readers can click to instantly confirm that what they are viewing matches what was actually filed. If this system had been in place, the false COVID stories could have been verified in a matter of seconds.
It’s important to consider why this is important outside of Italy. For a very long time, people’s trust in the media has been declining—and not always in a fair way. Roughly 64% of people think that journalists intentionally mislead them, according to the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer. That’s a startling figure that suggests a systemic breakdown of the infrastructure that once gave news its credibility, which goes beyond any one fake story. The underlying pressures of journalism—click-driven economics, speed culture, and partisan ownership—cannot be resolved by blockchain. However, it does provide a verifiable paper trail, which journalism does not currently offer.
Researchers at Gheorghe Asachi Technical University in Romania have gone further, proposing a platform that combines blockchain’s immutable architecture with artificial intelligence and what they call “crowd wisdom” — essentially a decentralized fact-checking system where independent nodes, rather than a single editorial authority, validate content against established records. The attraction is genuine. Centralized fact-checking has always been susceptible to its own prejudices. It is more difficult to manipulate a system that distributes verification among several actors, each of whom is answerable to a public ledger.
All of this is still met with a great deal of sincere skepticism. Blockchain is able to record published content, but it is unable to verify its veracity. Even if a lie is recorded in a ledger, it remains a lie. Furthermore, no technology by itself will be able to dismantle the deeper forces behind disinformation, such as political motivation, financial incentive, and the sheer human desire for outrage. Even a flawless provenance system might only encourage fraudsters to create phony accounts that appear credentialed rather than stealing authentic ones.
Even so, it’s difficult to ignore changes as the ANSA case develops. From having no defense against impersonation, the agency now has a system that allows any reader, anywhere, to quickly track down the source of a story. That isn’t a whole answer. However, it might be precisely the kind of infrastructure that actually modifies behavior in a media environment where the burden of proof has been reversed, where readers now assume guilt until innocence is proven. Not by exposing dishonest people. by making it more difficult to conceal lies.
