Abstract

As mis- and disinformation is created and shared with greater ease and speed, trust in online news media is declining. While the “infodemic” resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic is the most obvious recent example of this (Garneau & Zossou, 2021), the spread of mis- and disinformation is woven into conflicts around the globe, from the Russian invasion of Ukraine (Price, 2022; O’Neill, 2022), to divisive domestic tensions, like climate denial (Meyer, 2021). Reuters puts Canadians’ trust in “news overall” at 42 per cent (Newman et al., 2022, p. 119). While other studies provide a more optimistic overview (Bricker, 2021; Edelman Canada 2021), they still show that trust is an issue of concern. This paper will explain how a fact-checking decentralized application (dApp) could provide a democratic process for recording and verifying claim reviews, and through crowdsourcing verification and fostering transparency and digital media literacy, potentially help bolster public trust in news media. This paper is one component of a Research-Creation Thesis Project, which also consists of: (a) a website, checkmarker.org, that explores key problems negatively impacting trust and how a fact-checking dApp might work; (b) interviews with professionals with expertise relevant to trust in news media and/or blockchain; and (c) a short survey to gather preliminary feedback about the concept and the topic of trust in journalism. In the future, this project could lead to the development of a prototype of a fact-checking dApp, as well as be used to make a case for or against the use of blockchain in journalism.