Ensuring News Integrity against Online Information Disorder through Text Watermarking and Blockchain

The rapid proliferation of online information disorder poses a significant societal challenge. This phenomenon has been further exacerbated by the pervasive influence of social media, affecting a broad range of domains. Addressing the spread of information disorder through manual approaches ( e.g. , human fact-checking) is impractical due to the vast volume of textual content daily generated, often facilitated by disruptive generative technologies. Similarly, the implementation of automated tools presents considerable obstacles, primarily due to the inherent ambiguity and complexity of natural language. This paper introduces the CERVANTES platform: an innovative application of blockchain technology integrated with text watermarking techniques. It is conceived to support news producers and enhance awareness among readers engaging with content across various social media platforms. CERVANTES is a multiplatform and language-independent solution that addresses online information disorder from an innovative perspective. It allows news producers to automatically embed a unique watermark within the content they create, ensuring the integrity and authenticity of the text, and safeguarding it against manipulation and misattribution. Furthermore, the association between the watermark and the corresponding news item is securely recorded on the blockchain, mitigating the risk of manipulation that might result from centralised management. We conduct an extended evaluation on twelve different social media platforms with a cohort of twenty users, observing ease of use and a high degree of satisfaction. • A platform for ensuring the integrity of textual news, combining text watermarking with blockchain technology to track provenance. • Fine-grained watermarking to enable the identification of sources, even from small text excerpts. • Blockchain-based storage of verification information in a decentralised manner, guaranteeing the authenticity of textual news. • A browser extension for real-time verification of textual news, flagging any detected manipulations.