In this video I discuss how blockchains can help us fact check.

We are demanding of media to give us better fact checking! ...but how do we know truth anyways?

In order to truly understand this I first had to get philosophical...

1:09 I started by reading a short story, 'The Prince and the Magician' from part of a larger book: "The Magus" by John Fowles, that I think encapsulates this whole topic.

~it depends on who you ask~

…then I give a more analytical explanation of “what is fact”:

5:31 I gave the dictionary definition from macOS: “a thing that is known or proved to be true”.

From that I said that in order to have a fact you first have to have:

(1) a shared perception (in other words, it’s impossible to prove something is a certain color to someone who is blind)

(2) a shared standard, or definition/framework/language/system-of-measurement that you agree to, to explain what you are perceiving.

For example, if you are proving something is a certain length you are first agreeing to the framework of inches and feet.


7:43 Some things in life are very easy to fact check, because they have these two things in place.

For example, a sporting game.

A sporting game has a lot of perceivers (the audience) and a very strict standard (the rules of the game)

…so as you interview people as they walk out the game, everyone agrees that, “yes, that team won”.


9:18 Other things, like are certain foods healthy, are very hard to fact check…

…because everyone has different frameworks by which the measure “health” (vegans, paleo, standard american diet etc)


10:15 So in order to fact check you need to agree to a common standard.

But there are so many different standards, that it’s probably not going to happen on a global level...

…and so the problem, I think, with social media is just that we have put so many people into one common mixing pot…

…that people are demanding fact checking, because there is simply no universal standard that can accommodate everyone..


10:50 I also explain it’s may not even be desirable to have it happen, because too much agreement makes us vulnerable.

For example, if you only grow one variety of orange on your orchard, you are vulnerable to a bug bringing down your entire orchard.

…in the same way if we only had one operating system in the world, then if there was a bug everyone would be vulnerable.

So we want to have many perspectives so that our species is more robust.


13:27 Yet we also want to have convenience by having everyone using a common standard…

So we have to strike the right balance in order to fact check at a global scale…


14:14 So how does the blockchain help us fact check??

The blockchain itself is a standard (set of rules) that everyone agrees to and can be perceived publicly… so it itself is a “fact checking” machine.

and we can further define personal frameworks or sets of rules (smart contracts) that can allow us to fact check based on our interests.


15:38 Virtual things like video game items, or digital assets, can easily be fact checked, because they exist within the bounds of the blockchain.


16:00 …but what about fact checking the media?

Can we use the blockchain to better know truth through our media?

First I show how media by itself has been getting better at fact checking, because it has higher resolution media, and more perspectives.


17:22 However, I argue that what it lacks is the ability to verify authenticity…

…and is vulnerable to things like photoshop, deep fakes, etc…

So the blockchain can help with that.

We can use it to prove authenticity.


18:10 Metaphor of time stamping your idea using an envelope and the post office.


19:06 We can do something similar by taking content and publishing the hash of it to the blockchain.

With this no-one knows what the content is… just that there is a hash…

However, later you can verify content and prove authenticity by running your content through the hashing algorithm to generate the hash.


20:40 This could be applied to security cameras, consumer camera footage etc…


21:08 Even still with all of this sophisticated stuff…

…it is worth noting that the blockchain itself is just a standard, that can have “blind spots”

…and that we will never truly know the absolute truth through the blockchain.

That is just outside the scope of human perception…


23:00 I summarize what I said in the video…

Thanks for watching.