Developing a Source Authenticity System to Combat Fake News: An NFT-Based Approach

Fake news and rumors have long plagued social media users. Users may forward questionable social media posts to their peer, exacerbating the spread of fake news and rumors. The core problem here is how to thwart the chain of fake news circulation. Previous research shows inconsistent effectiveness of IT artifacts in solving the problem. One factor likely to have been overlooked in previous research is source authenticity. To address this problem, we develop a message source authentication system with the help of non-fungible token (NFT) technologies, named “Authenticity NFT”. With the help of Authenticity NFT, users can easily identify the source of social media posts and trust information from reliable sources. We design a series of experiment to test whether Authenticity NFT is effective in raising user awareness of source authenticity. Our work contributes to both the authenticity verification of social media news sources and the practical application of NFT.