A Taiwanese blockchain technology company is working with journalists to fact check the upcoming elections in India in the fight against digital deception.
Numbers Protocol says it took the same approach during the 2020 US presidential election and the January 2024 Taiwanese presidential election.
Ahead of India’s general elections starting April 19, a concerted effort will see cooperating news media and photojournalists capture content on location. This content is then uploaded to a blockchain platform using Numbers Protocol’s suite of tools, specifically Capture Cam and Capture Dashboard.
These tools aim to increase the credibility of captured digital media by detecting potential manipulation attempts through artificial intelligence.
In addition to professional journalists, Numbers Protocol has invited civil society organizations to contribute using the Capture application.
The platform automatically links all user-generated content to provenance data. This embedded data allows media organizations to efficiently verify the authenticity of such content.
Fact-checking gets a tech upgrade as AI detects election scandals
Numbers Protocol co-founder Timmy Yang shed light on the company’s approach to detecting deepfakes and manipulated media. He told Cryptonews that all content submitted by news outlets and photojournalists undergoes a blockchain registration process.
This allows users to upload the content to a verification engine powered by an AI model. The model then compares the uploaded content against a database of similar content. If the content comes from a trusted source, the engine will return an exact match.
Conversely, content from unverified sources will be compared to similar content from established sources. This will highlight potential discrepancies and give users a way to discern authentic information.
Upon registration, each piece of content receives a unique identifier, or Nid, generated using the ERC-7053 standard. This Nid corresponds directly to the hash of the content. Consequently, any change to the original content will result in a different hash and therefore a different Nid. In addition, the verification engine’s AI model can independently verify whether uploaded content matches the registered version.
He further said that the verification engine will also be available for public use.
“We are actively working with civil society groups and our own community in India on this project,” he said. “We believe that citizen reporters are just as important as the mainstream press and that their content should be protected and archived as well.”
Impartial selection for election media verification
To ensure impartiality, Yang stressed that the selection process for cooperating journalists and media organizations is carried out in a strictly impartial manner.
“Numbers Protocol is a decentralized network and the collaboration opportunity is open to all journalists and media outlets,” he said. “The value of Numbers Protocol is to present the full picture, showing provenance (i.e. where the content came from, how it was generated) to anyone who wants to know the story behind the content.”
The provenance data created verifies the integrity of digital content and can also be used by photojournalists as a mechanism to monetize and license their work.
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