With Journalists on Ethereum, Will Fake News Meet Its Match?

Before discussing the launch of a blockchain platform for newsrooms, there was one thing I had to clear up with the Matt Coolidge, co-founder and communication lead at the Civil Media Company: was he planning to put me out of a job?

Civil, one of the most high-profile projects under the umbrella of ethereum startup and incubator ConsenSys, is a response to a cascade of crises in journalism: the proliferation of "Fake news," the splintering of the media into ideological "Echo chambers" and technological disruption at the hands of search engines and social media.

The Civil platform is based on the ethereum blockchain, a distributed ledger that could allow newsrooms to post content no single party can alter or take down, while ethereum-based smart contracts could enable innovative methods of earning and distributing revenue to content creators.

In the meantime, newsrooms have already begun to publish on the Civil platform, including Documented, which covers immigrant communities in New York and the national immigration policies that affect them; Cannabis Wire, which tracks developments in the marijuana industry; and Sludge, which reports on lobbying and the influence of special interests in politics.

To understand how Civil plans on changing journalism, it's helpful to understand the main feature of the ethereum blockchain that the project plans to take advantage of.

Journalists who have launched newsrooms on Civil are particularly excited about this aspect.

While new revenue models are likely to be alluring for many newsrooms today, the most ambitious aspect of Civil's platform has to do with its token-based governance system.

Every newsroom on the platform deposits a certain number of CVL tokens, and if one participant feels another is behaving unethically - printing fake news or hate speech, plagiarizing, encouraging violence or otherwise violating the rules of the Civil constitution - they can challenge the alleged offender's place on the platform by staking a matching deposit of tokens.

In other words, in Coolidge's optimistic interpretation, the Civil governance system not only counteracts fake news, it enables "a very diverse ideological and political spectrum of newsrooms" - what he also called "The anti-echo chamber."

For now, journalists on the platform are more focused on Civil's possibilities than its potential pitfalls.