The leading Italian news agency, Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata (ANSA), which represents 24 major Italian newspapers and distributes over 3,000 news articles daily, announced in early April that it has begun using a blockchain-based solution run on the Ethereum public blockchain to verify the origin of news stories that appear on ANSA platforms or are distributed to other sites, such as social media pages. Stories actually originating from the ANSA platform (without modification) now bear a green digital “ANSAcheck” certificate that informs readers that the preceding story is a verified ANSA news article and is not manipulated or spoofed content or a story that has been altered to spread disinformation. (An image of the ANSAcheck stamp is below; for an example of the certificate on the Internet, look for the digital stamp at the end of this ANSA story).

Under the ANSAcheck program, each news item from ANSA is reduced to a cryptographic hash using EY OpsChain Traceability technology and stored as a digital token on the public Ethereum blockchain. When a reader opens an ANSA story on a web browser, the browser compares the text of the article with the parameters recorded on the blockchain and displays the ANSAcheck digital seal if there is a match. If clicked on, the digital seal displays certain data, such as the date the story was published and other block information, as well as an ANSA Certificate, an example of which is shown below.