Can cryptographically authenticating content help prevent fake news?
In November 2019, Adobe, The New York Times and Twitter, concerned about the spread of fake news and the ease of producing it, founded the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI).
The idea was to create a metadata standard that would allow the industry to verify the provenance of and the extent to which, an image, video, audio and other digital content may have been manipulated. In February 2021, Adobe, along with Arm, the BBC, Intel, Microsoft, and Truepic, co-founded the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), which designed an open, royalty-free technical standard, a system that provides information about the provenance and history of content to digital media, providing a tool for creators to claim authorship while also allowing consumers to make informed decisions about what to trust.
The standard allows the collection of metadata that contains details about the origin of the information displayed on a digital device, which can include everything from the publisher of the information, the device used to record it, or the location and time of the successive recordings or edits that at any given time altered the content. To ensure that C2PA metadata can’t be modified, it’s protected with hash codes and certified digital signatures. The same applies to the main content of information…
