Tracing the Source of Fake News using a Scalable Blockchain Distributed Network

Abstract

In the news industry, as well as in social media, fake news detection and identification of news sources has become a central topic of discussion. In the era of digitization, anyone can easily generate or manipulate digital content and publish them on social media websites. On the one hand, these social networking platforms provide ample ease in modern-day communication but on the other hand, using such platforms has posed new challenges to real-world implementation like viral spreading of false/fake information with malicious intentions. In this paper, a naive blockchain and watermarking based social media framework is proposed to control the fake news propagation. We postulate a new blockchain model to mitigate existing challenges in this field. Moreover, the novel solution can help in reducing the spread of fake news by tracing the root or origin of the fake news on social media. Through our experimental results, we show that our blockchain-based solution is able to immediately stream data through a bloXroute server that can propagate data up to 100 times faster than conventional solutions.