Embedding transparency, enhancing trust

Trust in news has been declining for some time. There are many intersecting reasons for this, but recent advances in generative AI, and the fact that almost anyone can make synthetic (fake) images quickly and easily, are making it a lot more difficult for people to trust what they see online.

In the face of ever increasing complexity on- and offline, audiences deserve to know definitively where their content came from and whether or not it has been altered in some way.

If you know how it's made, you can trust what it says

At the BBC, we ensure that we report the truth. This can take time, and even if it means that we’re not the first to a story, it is one of our guiding principles. We hold ourselves to the highest journalistic standards, producing reliable, accurate journalism. BBC journalists do rigorous manual verification of the media we publish to ensure it is an authentic depiction of events.

We check content against other sources, examine the metadata, compare locations, weather, and search for other instances of the material online. We do everything we can to ensure we’re not furthering the spread of disinformation. And where we do find it, we call it out.

But we also recognise that it’s not enough to ask audiences to trust us at face value, we need to show audiences how we sort fact from fiction, and do so securely, binding the context to the content.

"That’s why we are proud to lead the way with a brand new feature that will allow consumers to see how we have checked and verified that the images we use are authentic," said the BBC News CEO. "In a world of deep fakes, disinformation and distortion, this transparency is more important than ever."

And so, in News Labs, we have been exploring the best way to surface the trust BBC journalists have in the content they publish. We‘re working with BBC Verify to integrate their work, carefully compiling their in-depth verification of the authenticity of an image or video into the published media.

C2PA and media provenance

In 2019, a consortium called Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, or C2PA, was co-founded by BBC Research & Development alongside other members, including Adobe and Microsoft. Since then, C2PA has developed a technical standard to encode information about the provenance of imagery, video and audio — information (or signals) that show where a piece of media has come from, and how it’s been edited. Similar to an audit trail or a history, these signals are called “content credentials”.

Content credentials can be used to help audiences distinguish between authentic, trustworthy media, and content that has been faked.

The C2PA technology has been developed in collaboration with major media and technology partners. Membership in C2PA is growing to include organisations from all over the world, from established hardware manufacturers like Canon, to technology leaders like OpenAI, fellow media organisations like NHK, and even the Publicis Group covering the advertising industry. Google has now joined the C2PA steering committee and social media companies are leaning in too: Meta have recently announced they are actively assessing implementing C2PA across their platforms.

As more organisations sign up, more media will start having content credentials included, and internet users will increasingly be able to judge the authenticity of what they’re seeing for themselves.

But it’s going to take time to become commonplace. So to give our audiences the reassurance they deserve about the content we’re publishing, we have combined the cryptographic signing mechanism of C2PA with the manual verification information from our journalists for images that come into the newsroom from sources lacking C2PA-enabled devices.

This not only means that audiences can make up their own minds about whether it’s trustworthy, but that if the media is shared elsewhere, this information can be traced back.

The question is whether audiences will find it valuable. To discover this, we’re running a limited trial with BBC Verify, gathering data and understanding more about how transparency can contribute to building trust.

BBC News' story about armed gangs storming a major prison in Haiti features media carrying the new content credentials.

We’ll share more of our findings when they come.

Further reading

• Mark the good stuff: Content provenance and the fight against disinformation — BBC Research & Development blog
• New technology to show why images and video are genuine launches on BBC News — BBC Media Centre