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Case Study

How an Italian news agency used blockchain to combat fake news

Faced with the threat of fake news, Italian news agency ANSA introduced blockchain technology to help uphold its reputation for reliability.

Client
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The better the question

How can media outlets trace the source of their news with confidence?

In a world where fake news proliferates, ANSA explored new ways of proving that their output is trustworthy.

For as long as there has been information, there has been misinformation. But what we now know as “fake news” has increased exponentially since the ubiquity of social media made it possible for anyone to publish stories and disseminate them worldwide, without any way for readers to check their veracity. By making it harder to tell real news from fake, this undermines public trust in the media.

Stefano De Alessandri, CEO of Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata (ANSA), Italy’s leading news agency, says that social media has fundamentally altered ANSA’s role. “Once, we had to be the first to break the news,” he explains. “Now, in many cases, we are the last – but when we do publish news, everyone knows they can rely 99.9% on what we are saying.”

This reliability is crucial for ANSA, which was founded in 1945 as part of the Allies’ efforts to rebuild democracy in Italy, with freedom of speech and a free press at its heart. Owned by 28 newspapers that are among its main clients, ANSA produces around 3,000 stories a day in seven languages for media outlets in 80 countries.

Today, though, fake news poses a threat to the legitimacy of the stories that ANSA writes and distributes, potentially undermining its hard-won reputation. According to the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer, 64% of people believe journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations. The same survey found that only 51% of people trust owned media as a source for general news and information, while just 44% trust social media.

ANSA experienced the impact of fake news for itself in April 2020. Italy had been the first country in Europe to be affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and rumors were circulating about when the government was going to end the first national lockdown. In the space of a week, three untrue stories bearing ANSA’s branding, and claiming that the Prime Minister planned to lift the restrictions on a particular date, were published and spread across social media.

De Alessandri personally received dozens of calls about the story, including some from people in government, all of them asking why a previously reliable website like ANSA was publishing fake news.

“When you publish something wrong, you can easily correct it and make it disappear,” he explains. “Except, if someone has taken a screenshot, then the screenshot is the proof that you were saying something different. So, we were in a kind of difficulty, because we said, ‘We didn’t do that’, but we couldn’t prove it.”

Keenly aware that its brand was under threat, ANSA had already started looking for a way to reassure readers that its content was trustworthy, and this incident made the search for a solution even more urgent. The key question it needed to answer was: how can we prove that we are a reliable source of news?

The Ansa editorial team are seen in the newsroom
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The better the answer

A new use case for a better technology

EY teams identified a way of using blockchain to provide a simple solution to a complex problem.

The EY organization had started a conversation with De Alessandri to illustrate potential uses for blockchain, which is most commonly employed to prevent tampering in financial transactions and contracts, and to track assets.

However, in the wake of the COVID-19 related fake news issue, the EY team proposed an innovative approach to ANSA, and De Alessandri realized this technology could provide the answer he was looking for.

A blockchain is essentially a series of unchangeable records of data, each time-stamped and displayed as a shared ledger. This provides transparency, which was ultimately what ANSA needed. So, the EY team worked with ANSA and used existing EY blockchain technology to create an innovative solution that would make it possible for readers to trace the origin of the agency’s stories and track each one through its entire history of updates and reposts on third-party news websites.

When an ANSA editor publishes a news story, it is automatically fed into the OpsChain system, with its ID and publication details contained in a block that is made immutable through “notarization” on blockchain. When a story is published online, it is given an “ANSAcheck” icon which readers can click on to see who has written it and, potentially, republished it. If any changes or corrections are made after the story has been published, the information about the revisions will also appear on the relevant ANSAcheck page.

How EY can Help

Best practice

In November 2020, EY teams and ANSA publicized the blockchain solution as part of a live psychology experiment at the EY wavespace™ in Rome. EY teams gathered different stakeholders – ranging from policymakers to academic institutions – to discuss the social and economic impact of fake news and to test their perception of news stories. At the same event, ANSA used an Implicit Association Test and eye tracking to monitor the emotional reactions of 50 volunteers to five real and five fake news stories and revealed which stories had provoked the greatest reactions.

 

The EY teams provided ANSA with a report outlining the test’s results and detailing what types of content, images and story length best engage an audience and drive sharing – techniques which distributors of fake news are highly skilled at deploying.

 

EY teams and ANSA also collaborated to develop examples of best practice writing and page-build approaches for various subject areas. ANSA can share these with ecosystem partners to increase the quality of their news, furthering the reach of genuine stories and raising their profile.

 

Woman scrolling news on smartphone
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The better the world works

Transparency that produces trust

ANSAcheck helps to protect ANSA’s brand and reputation, and the agency is now exploring further applications of blockchain.

Since its introduction, the ANSAcheck system has repeatedly worked as designed.

De Alessandri highlights the issues ANSA, along with other prominent global media organizations, faced in the early days of the war in Ukraine, when their websites were cloned to spread fake news about the war in Ukraine. The blockchain solution made it easy for readers to identify that such stories did not actually originate from ANSA, helping to protect its reputation.

For De Alessandri, this is the primary benefit of the EY OpsChain solution. “Blockchain protects our brand and our reputation, which are our main assets,” he says. “It’s not about achieving a competitive advantage. I don’t want it to be a competitive advantage – I want all content creators to introduce EY OpsChain Notarization, because fighting against fake news is a real problem for everybody. It’s a problem for democracy, it’s a problem for the government, it’s a problem for the people.”

He is also keen to stress that the blockchain solution cannot in itself eradicate fake news. “It’s about reliability,” he explains. “It shows that we are the ones publishing this news, and therefore people can rely on the information because of our reputation.”

ANSA’s peers and competitors were initially sceptical about the use of blockchain in journalism, but validation came in the shape of a paper published by the Blockchain Center of Excellence at the University of Arkansas (pdf), which told the story of the development of ANSAcheck and looked at the lessons other companies seeking to build blockchain-based solutions could learn from ANSA’s experience. This led to enquiries from academics and others who wanted to know more about the solution and helped to validate ANSA’s pioneering initiative.

New applications

ANSA has also found new applications for EY OpsChain Notarization. One is to protect itself from piracy and misuse of its newswires by using blockchain to log registrations, so that ANSA can quickly see who actually has the right to distribute its stories. Another is to provide hard evidence in lawsuits that may be brought against the agency; for example, in cases of alleged breaches of privacy laws or publishing incorrect information. EY OpsChain Notarization makes it straightforward for ANSA to ascertain whether a given article was published as presented and, if not, to mount a defense.

A third application, which ANSA was starting to think about even before the blockchain solution was adopted, is in artificial intelligence (AI). One of the most controversial aspects of AI is the material that such systems use to “train” themselves on, particularly when that material includes copyrighted or sensitive information.

A law currently being discussed by the Italian Parliament, and which ANSA has been consulted on, includes a proposal for blockchain to be used for watermarking information, so that it is possible to see when it has been accessed by AI as part of the training process.

How EY can Help

Finally, the solution has enabled ANSA to create a new ecosystem-based business model with built-in trust that extends to each partner, helping to protect the reputations of multiple media brands. It also makes it more difficult for fake news to be shared; if a story is tampered with, it loses the ANSAcheck icon, which means its validity can no longer be assured.

 

De Alessandri is confident that a time will come when not having a similar solution to affirm the trustworthiness of content will be a competitive disadvantage for media organizations, and that verification technology will eventually become an industry standard. Indeed, the Italian parliament is currently discussing a bill that would make blockchain verification compulsory for news organizations, something that De Alessandri says would “change the way the media world works”.

 

In the meantime, ANSAcheck continues to work to protect, deepen, and reaffirm readers’ trust in the news that ANSA produces, which aligns perfectly with its purpose of being a trusted source of news and information.


How EY can Help

Related topics
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EY wavespace™

The Team

Giuseppe Perrone

EY EMEIA Blockchain Leader; EY Italy Innovation Consulting Leader
Seasoned blockchain leader in financial services, government and public sector, consumer products and retail, health care, transportation, and automotive. Passionate about innovation. Sports fan.
 

Paul Brody

EY Global Blockchain Leader
Leader of blockchain technology. Proficient in mobile technologies, business strategy and internet of things.
Palo Alto, USA

Federico De Poli

EY OpsChain Global Product Manager; EMEIA Blockchain Technical Lead
Innovation enthusiast. Passionate about emerging technologies and how they can transform businesses.
Milano, ITA
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