This study aims to identify and assess AI and blockchain solutions in relation to journalistic authenticity and integrity. Central to our exploration is the role of blockchain technology in verifying content provenance. As a key component of a global Web3 framework, blockchain could offer a foundation for authenticating the origins of content. In this article, we explore how blockchain, with its capacityfor creating immutable and cryptographically signed data records, could be applied by journalists to verify photos, videos and documents. Our analysis identified nine blockchain-based solutions for content verification, with three platforms–Attestiv, OriginStamp, and Fact Protocol–showing particular promise for journalistic workflows. We conclude that while AI and blockchain solutions are currently available to journalists today, they require high-level technical expertise. Many media companies are now venturing into this field as well, thus affecting the professional role of journalists in general. In our study, it is evident that integrating AI and blockchain in journalism is not merely about adopting new tools but also about understanding their broader implications for journalism as a profession and the convergence in society. The focus must remain on enhancing journalistic integrity and public trust to ensure that these technological advances benefit thefield of journalism and, by extension, the democratic processes it supports.

This study investigates the impact of Arab governmental restrictions on journalists’ use of ChatGPT, a leading Generative AI chatbot. Through interviews with 30 journalists from Syria, Libya, Jordan, and Egypt, the research reveals how journalists utilize ChatGPT and face severe censorship. These journalists perceive such censorship as violating their constitutional rights. The findings suggest that current digital legislation enables governments to exert greater control over information dissemination, undermining media independence. The study concludes that government actions to block ChatGPT access constitute a form of indirect or “soft” censorship within existing legal frameworks. 

Even though blockchain technology remains at an early stage of development, this chapter calls for considering its potential impact on the future of the internet, which by extension could have long-term consequences on journalism. Research on blockchain’s potential impact on journalism remains relatively thin despite the major developments taking place in the blockchain space, bringing blockchain closer to mass adoption. This work contributes to this field by providing a high-level overview of the topic mainly targeting journalism scholars and practitioners but could be useful for other readers as well. It starts by highlighting some similarities between today’s blockchain status and the early internet and then provides a high-level non-technical overview of blockchain technology for beginners in this field. The main contribution of the chapter, however, is in presenting journalistic use cases in five domains: (1) verifying provenance, (2) investigative journalism, (3) content monetization and dissemination, (4) intellectual property and archiving, and (5) freedom of expression. It is hoped that readers would use this work as a primer to understand the potential changes that blockchain-driven Web3 could have on journalism in the future by drawing comparisons to the role the internet played in journalism after it went mainstream at the start of the century. 

Sociala medier spelar en central roll i nyhetsflödet från kriget i Ukraina. Både som källor och som plattformar för distribution och cirkulation av innehåll. I de sociala medieflödena finns viktiga vittnesskildringar från människor som befinner sig i krigets centrum, men också desinformation och konspirationsteorier. I Ukraina har den sociala medieplattformen Telegram blivit den viktigaste källan till information för många människor, trots att den har ryska rötter. 

Den här boken undersöker nyhetsflödet från kriget i Ukraina, men också människors medieanvändning och förtroende för den information de möter genom olika typer av medier. Den är resultatet av ett samarbete mellan svenska och ukrainska forskare som analyserat tusentals artiklar och uppdateringar på sociala medier, gjort intervjuer med medieanvändare i Ukraina, och analyserat svenska folkets nyhetskonsumtion. Allt detta lägger grunden för en analys av ett nytt och framväxande hybridmediesystem, där traditionella, alternativa, och sociala medier konkurrerar om människors uppmärksamhet, men också ger olika bilder av krigets orsaker och konsekvenser. 

This article analyses and discusses attitudes and practices concerning verification among Swedish journalists. The research results are based on a survey of more than 800 Swedish journalists about their attitudes towards verification (Journalist 2018) and a design project where a prototype for verification in newsrooms – the Fact Check Assistant (FCA) – was developed and evaluated. The results of the survey show a lack of routines when it comes to verifying content from social media and blogs and considerable uncertainty among journalists about whether this kind of verification is possible.

The development of the prototype initially created reactions of interest and curiosity from the newsroom staff. Gradually, however, the degree of scepticism about its usability increased. A lack of time and a lack of knowledge were two of the obstacles to introducing new verification routines. It is not enough to introduce new digital tools, according to the journalists. Management must also allocate time for training. The paper’s ultimate conclusion is that changing journalists’ and editors’ attitudes towards verification in this digital age appears to be guided by newsroom culture rather than technical solutions.

This method case study describes how we extracted and analyzed data from Twitter as part of a research project to investigate how users connected climate change to extreme weather events during 2008–2017. The paper describes how the open-source tool, Mecodify, was used as a fundamental part of the method to download data from Twitter and identify key insights through tables, graphs and machine-readable files. The paper goes into detail to describe the steps that were taken from the building the search query to analyzing, aggregating, and visualizing the data used to describe the findings. Although Mecodify facilitated the process significantly, the paper highlights some of the challenges that were confronted during different research stages and how they were overcome. The aim is to provide social media researchers with some useful insights for their own research.

A core concept within journalism is the demand for correctness and the ability to double-check news and its sources (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2014). In this paper, we reflect on the development of a prototype to study the possible use of blockchain technology to create a global secure database of fact-checks that is open to the public. The prototype utilized Hyperledger fabric to create a permissioned blockchain that stores fact-checks created by its users. Through automated processes using smart contracts (chain code applications), we aimed to create a solution that would improve the reliability of fact-checking and keep track of each fact-checking process for digital content, including pictures and videos.

Our conclusion is that it is indeed possible to create a blockchain-based system that allows the establishment of a network of fact-checkers that could collectively build and maintain a globally accessible fact-checking database. However, based on technical developments and the evaluation performed by the professional fact-checkers and data journalists in our study, we conclude that the cost, complexity, and rapid technological changes required in this domain indicate that blockchain technology is not yet ready to be directly applied to fact-checking processes in a real-world scenario.

As a social networking and microblogging platform that allows communication with short messages, Twitter has the potential of being used by social scientists to study users, uses, and societal communication and networking online. This How-to Guide introduces practical steps on how to gather and analyze Twitter data to answer research questions of interest. The guide starts with a discussion of the value that studying Twitter brings to social scientists while noting some of the main challenges and limitations. Thereafter, the guide introduces general principles that need to be understood prior to doing Twitter research. Those principles are meant to help guide the researcher in creating a proper research design starting with formulating the research questions, moving to the stage of identifying the most effective methods for data gathering, and ending with the analysis stage to answer those questions. Readers who wish to explore the field are encouraged to apply the main guidelines presented in this guide to case studies using tools that allow the extraction and analysis of Twitter data.

As a social networking and microblogging platform that allows communication with short messages, Twitter has the potential of being used by social scientists to study users, uses, and societal communication and networking online. This How-to Guide introduces practical steps on how to extract and analyze Twitter data using the Mecodify open-source tool as a demonstration of using one of the widely used tools to do Twitter research. The intention behind using just one tool is to shorten the reader’s learning curve through a brief but practical introduction to an established open-source tool that is meant to make Twitter research more intuitive and easier to do. Readers who wish to explore the field further are encouraged to experiment with other tools that have richer features such as advanced correlation and regression analysis and artificial intelligence-driven natural language processing, which are beyond the scope of this guide.

Social media has created new public spheres that provide alternative sources of social and political authority. Such “digital authority” has conventionally been interpreted in metric terms, without qualitative distinctions. Based on Twitter data from four different Swedish state agencies during the first 15 months of the COVID-19 crisis, this paper looks at the different kinds of modes of interaction Twitter enables and their impact on state agencies digital authority. Theoretically this paper applies Valentin Voloshinov's classical theory on reported speech, developed in the 1920s, to the concept of digital authority in the Twitter-sphere of the 2020s. Besides these theoretical contributions to media and communication studies, the main findings are that retweets are generally used to affirm and spread information thus strengthening the digital authority of the origin of the tweet whilst replies and quote-tweets are used to undermine the credibility of the sender and the content of the original tweet, often by resorting to irony. As the COVID-19 crisis prolongs, we observe increasing share of critical commentary and diminishing overall attention to government actors in Sweden. The roles of different state agencies are mirrored by the type of interaction they generate. This article also shows the usefulness of qualitative study of social media interaction in order to reveal the dynamics of digital authority construed in social media.