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When a news photo makes its journey from a camera to publication, it passes through many devices, technologies and people. Each step in this journey is designed to ensure the truthfulness and accuracy of the person or event depicted in the photo. However, once the photo makes it to the internet, it can end up anywhere in a matter of minutes — sometimes without its original context or with purposely misleading information.
The Research & Development team at The New York Times has been exploring a number of different solutions to address the issue of misinformation online. One of those explorations experimented with blockchain technology.
Blockchain is a database technology that allows multiple organizations to read from and write to a shared database. It tracks these changes in a log of actions, otherwise known as a “ledger.”
We built a prototype that leveraged blockchain to surface a news photo’s metadata, or under-the-hood information that exists in image files, on a simulated social media feed. We wanted to see whether visible contextual information, such as the photographer’s name and the location depicted in the photo, could help readers better discern the credibility of news photos in their social feeds.
We wanted to see if it was possible to record everything that happens to a photo, from capture to publication, in the form of photo metadata and display that information on social media platforms.
For our prototype, we created a private network of theoretical news organizations and a simulated social media platform that shared ownership of a database and a ledger. The news organizations that were part of the network could make changes to photo metadata in the database. The ledger ensured that there was a transparent record of the time and author of the changes.
If we were able to successfully implement our vision for this technology in the real world, it might allow a social media user to quickly verify whether a viral photo of an altercation between police and protesters actually happened in the time and place that an unfamiliar Facebook account purports it did, rather than, say, five years earlier in a different context.
We focused on a simple scenario where a news organization was aware of a photo’s origin information and was responsible for publishing the photo in an article. We constructed a blockchain network that involved three network member organizations, or “nodes”: two theoretical news organizations (Local Gazette and National News) and one social media organization (the Social Media Platform).
With these nodes, two different news organizations could run photos and update their associated metadata; the news organizations could publish the same photo in different articles; and the social media platform could access all photo history and publishing information.
For our prototype, we kept it very simple: Only one other organization needed to approve usages, and every usage was automatically approved. For example, anytime Local Gazette wanted to add a new photo to the database on the blockchain, it had to get permission from National News. But National News automatically approved the transaction without actually checking for truth or accuracy.
After conducting 34 user research interviews with people with different political perspectives, we came up with a list of contextual information that the people in our interviews found most useful about a photo, such as who took it and where it was taken.
This exercise helped us construct a data model for storing metadata in our blockchain database in the form of a photo record.
The people we interviewed indicated that in addition to learning about the origins of a photo, they wished to understand the publishing history of a photo, such as where the photo had been published and what captions had been written for it.
Because news services, like The Associated Press or Reuters, often work with multiple news organizations, a single photo might be published in many different news articles. With this in mind, we created a separate publishing record in our data model that would enable us to track publishing information around a photo.
When testing our prototype with users, we found that it effectively helped them make informed judgments about photos in a social media feed. But more research and exploration needs to be done.
In order for a blockchain solution to become a reality, news organizations with varying financial and technical resources need to be able to participate. Finding ways to lower the barriers to entry is an essential component of any future explorations.
This experiment taught us a lot about the power of credible, contextual information in social media feeds, but there is a long way to go before something like this can be fully realized. Nevertheless, there is a large opportunity for using blockchain to help fight against misinformation in news photos. As with any network, it’s only as powerful as the size of its participation.
A version of this article appeared in NYT Open, The Times’s blog that shares how we design and build products for news.