Theme: Trust and Credibility in the Media

How can metadata and content modelling help with the problems of trust in the media, misinformation, disinformation and “fake news”?

Detecting fake and manipulated content is important, and we do feature companies that work in this area. However most of our ongoing effort is not about detecting what is fake, but rather enabling consumers to verify that the news they are seeing genuinely comes from the people they think it does. We refer to this as “trusted provenance.”

We have been working with many groups in this area: The Trust Project, Trusted News Initiative from Reporters sans Frontiers, Content Authenticity Initiative, Coalition for Content Authenticity and Provenance (C2PA), JournalList and others.

A graphic showing the "trust workflow" from agency, through publisher and platform, to the user.
A graphic showing the “trust workflow” from agency, through publisher and platform, to the user.

We actively participate in C2PA and contributed the sections of the specification that allow Exif tags and IPTC Photo and Video Metadata properties to be embedded in a verifiable way in C2PA-enabled media.

Support for Trust and Credibility in IPTC Standards

In 2019 and 2020, we added fields to ninjs, our standard for news in JSON, to accommodate trust signals such as those from The Trust Project and the Journalism Trust Initiative. We also ensured that NewsML-G2 can already accommodate them, but no changes to the standard were necessary.

We are creating a set of guidelines, “Trust and Credibility in IPTC Standards” where we show how to implement trust signals and trusted provenance using IPTC standards. After a series of drafts, the 1.0 version was published at https://iptc.org/std/guidelines/trust-and-credibility/ in August 2023.

Recent content on Trust and Credibility in the Media

  • August 2023: Version 1.0 of the guidance document Expressing Trust and Credibility information in IPTC Standards version 1.0 was published.
  • November 2022: Panel on trust and credibility at the 2022 IPTC Photo Metadata Conference 

    • Use of C2PA in real-world workflows: a session demonstrating progress made in implementing C2PA technology to make images and video tamper-evident and to establish a provenance trail for creative works. Featuring Nigel Earnshaw and Charlie Halford, BBC; Jay Li, Microsoft; David Beaulieu and Jonathan Dupras, CBC/Radio Canada and Gavin Peacock (Principal Scientist) and Pia Blumenthal (lead product designer), Content Authenticity Initiative / Adobe

  • October 2022: Presentations at the IPTC Autumn Meeting 2022 on AI (Full video available to IPTC Members via the Members-Only page)
    • Project Origin and C2PA update: Brendan Quinn, IPTC Managing Director
    • Deepfake detection with Reality Defender.ai: Ben Colman, Co-Founder/CEO, Reality Defender 
  • May 2022: Presentations on trust and credibility topics at the 2022 IPTC Spring Meeting (Full video available to IPTC Members via the Members-Only page):
    • C2PA / Project Origin update: Brendan Quinn, IPTC Managing Director
  • November 2021: Presentations on trust and credibility at the 2021 IPTC Photo Metadata Conference:
    • Santiago Lyon, Head of Advocacy and Education for the Adobe-led Content Authenticity Initiative, to speak about the CAI and its sister project, C2PA – the Coalition for Content Authenticity and Provenance. We looked at some details around how C2PA technology will fulfil the requirements of CAI to provide tamper-evident images and videos. 
  • October 2021: Presentations on trust and credibility at the 2021 IPTC Autumn Meeting (Full video available to IPTC Members via the Members-Only page):
    • Trust.txt and W3C Credibility community group: Scott Yates, JournalList.net
    • Project Origin: Bruce MacCormack, CBC / Radio Canada
    • C2PA Update: Charlie Halford, BBC
  • May 2021: Presentations on trust and credibility at the 2021 IPTC Spring Meeting (Full video available to IPTC Members via the Members-Only page):
    • WeVerify project – Denis Tayssou, AFP
    • WordProof and the Trusted Web – Sebastiaan van der Lans, WordProof
    • C2PA: the technology behind CAI and Project Origin – Leonard Rosenthal, Adobe / C2PA