A Web Infrastructure for Certifying Multimedia News Content for Fake News Defense

Abstract

In dealing with altered multimedia news content, also referred to as fake news, we present a ready-to-deploy scheme based on existing public key infrastructure as a new fake news defense paradigm. This scheme enables news organizations to certify/endorse a newsworthy multimedia news content and securely and conveniently pass this trust information to end users. A news organization can use our program to digitally sign the multimedia news content with its private key. By installing a browser extension, an end user can easily verify whether a news content has been endorsed and by which organization. It is totally up to the end user whether to trust the news or the endorsing news organization. The underlining principles of our scheme are that fake news will sooner or later be identified as fake by general population, and a news organization puts its long-term reputation on the line when endorsing a news content.