As deepfakes proliferate, their ability to mislead and sow mistrust is of greater interest to security experts — and the general public. Recent overview by McAfee found that the vast majority of Americans (84%) are concerned about how deepfakes will be used in 2024, particularly when it comes to elections and addresses given by public figures.
Several solutions to the problem of deepfakes have been proposed, from encryption watermarks to metadata — none perfect. However, a growing number of news organizations are rallying around blockchain technology as a means of verifying that content is from a trusted source.
Fox became the latest example, announcing today that it has partnered with Polygon Labs, a layer 2 blockchain focused on scaling Ethereum, to release an open source protocol for media companies to register their articles, photos and more . Called Verify, Fox and Polygon are pitching the protocol as a means for stores to protect their IP while allowing consumers to verify the authenticity of content.
“The Verify protocol establishes the provenance and history of original journalism by cryptographically signing individual pieces of content on the blockchain,” Fox CTO Melody Hildebrandt told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Powered by a content graph, which associates content with its verified publisher.”
The New York Times has explored a similar approach to news verification through the News Provenance Project, which uses blockchain to track metadata such as sources and edits for news photos. Photo and video authentication startup Truepic also subscribes content to the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains to create a chain of custody.
However, Fox aims to develop its technology on a larger scale than previous efforts.
In August, Fox released a beta version of Verify, co-developed with Polygon, to coincide with the GOP primary debate on Fox News. The company says it now uses Verify to list content from Fox-owned brands such as Fox News, Fox Business and Fox Sports, as well as Fox-affiliated television stations.
According to Hildebrandt, around 80,000 news stories have been signed up with Verify so far.
“The protocol is fully open source and free for publishers and other manufacturers to use,” Hildebrandt said. “We intend and look forward to other media companies and content publishers adopting the Verify protocol and integrating it into a variety of publishing platforms.”
Third-party applications can be built on top of Verify, which is designed to support all types of media content. However, Fox has released its own tool that can be used to verify uploaded images or articles (via a URL) that match items registered with the Verification protocol.
If a match is found, Fox’s Verify app will display the publisher information associated with the content in addition to the original title and URL. If there is no match, it can be assumed that the content is fabricated or otherwise tampered with.
Beyond authentication, Verify can be used as a way to license content to vendors to train or serve AI models being built, Hildebrandt says — an exciting use case as the race between vendors and news publishers heats up. Using Verification, publishers can enforce controls to ensure they are properly compensated based on how a vendor decides to implement their content.
“Verify is also a technical ramp for AI platforms to license publisher content with coded controls via smart contracts for LLM training or real-time use cases,” said Hildebrandt. “We are in discussions with several media companies and expect to be able to share more on this front soon.”
Or course, this is all voluntary – Verify’s success depends on publishers, news consumers and AI producers choosing to adopt the platform. For a number of reasons — competing authentication solutions are one — they may be discouraged from doing so. Time, I guess, will tell.
