A new startup wants to use blockchain technology to give news organizations new tools to fight disinformation.
This week, Now Media is launching Sovereignty, a technology platform that uses blockchain technology to provide digital media organizations with verification tools to help authenticate digital content.
In a conversation with Semafor, founders Matt Medved and Alejandro Navia said Sovereignty leverages Coinbase's Ethereum Layer 2 technology to authenticate content on the blockchain. They say this will allow users to see a clear and unalterable record of the creation of content and the edits made to it.
“In the age of AI and disinformation, it's becoming increasingly difficult to know who wrote and created what,” Medved said about the product on a Zoom call.
The two said they had productive conversations with publishers to explain how the technology works. Now Media wants publishers to integrate his Sovereignty into their content management systems, allowing them to create a unique signature each time content is published. This helps viewers understand the original source material and decide for themselves whether the publisher is trustworthy.
Now Media's founders said it was important to launch the publication this year, in the run-up to the US presidential election, and noted that advances in artificial intelligence will enable the spread of fake media to become increasingly realistic.
“AI will never be less sophisticated than it is now,” Navia says. “While this has its benefits, it becomes an increasingly dangerous tool in the wrong hands.”
