New York Times Seeks Help From Blockchain Technology To Combat Fake News.

Combating fake news andmisinformation is one ofjournalism’s biggest challenges. There have been manyattempts to help readers recognize when a source shouldn’t be trusted. One of the latest ideasto handle thiscomes thanks to news media publisherThe New York Times and Blockchain technology.

The New York Times Company has revealed new details regarding its current developing Blockchain publishing experiments initially revealed by CoinDesk in March.

According to an article published, a new website for the publisher’s News Provenance Project reports that in partnership with IBM Garage, the tech’s giant accelerator program, the newspaper’s Research and Development team plans to use Hyprledger Fabric’s authorized Blockchain to verify news photographs.

The projects aims at tackling misinformation and adulterated media, which tend to harm both small and large publishers. “News consumers [who] are deceived and confused…eventually become fatigued and apathetic to news,” the website says.

To figure out a way to maintain trust through digital files, The New York Times and other partner companies will run a proof-of-concept from July until the end of 2019. The project intends to store the news article’s “contextual metadata” on a Blockchain, which will also include the details of the photo or video shot.

The motive is to assemble a “set of signals that can travel with published media anywhere that material is displayed,” the website says, including on social media platforms, in search results and in group chats.

The Times will purportedly keep publishing updates on the project throughout the whole procedure, which will cumulatively add up to a full report following the conclusion.

Civil Media CEO, Vivian Schiller, who was formerly with the New York Times tweeted about the same. Additional confirmation was provided through a lengthy Medium post from Sasha Koren, the program’s project lead.

Previously in March, CoinDesk reported that the Times was preparing to experiment with Blockchain technology after posting –then retrieving soon after–a want ad for a project leader.