BBC News marks content 'verified' to counter disinformation
Metadata and trail of provenance embedded into images and video
BBC News has started marking third-party images and videos on its website as “verified”.
The aim is to counter the growing problem of AI-generated and altered content presented as reality.
A verified video or image has its metadata including the author, the date it was taken, location, camera details and any subsequent edits or changes embedded into the content, allowing readers and viewers to check its authenticity and chain of providence.
As well as cryptographically binding the metadata to the content, BBC staff use standard investigatory techniques to check its authenticity, such as seeing if the weather in a photo or video matches the conditions on the day it was purportedly taken, that physical features match real items at the location, and so on.
Verified content on the BBC News site is accompanied by a button reading "How we verified this". An example from Monday is a video on a story on gang violence in Haiti, which includes footage uploaded to TikTok.
"The video from the cemetery was first uploaded to TikTok on Saturday 2 March at 1750G (1250 local)," notes the accompanying text. "We've matched the gravestones, a large tree and other landmarks to existing images found Google Maps for the Grand Cemetery. The direction of the shadows observed indicates it was filmed in the morning."
Footage from areas of conflict is notoriously prone to manipulation for propaganda purposes, with video repurposed from previous conflicts, or, increasingly, edited convincingly or created from scratch.
To authenticate the videos and photos, BBC News has adopted the Content Credentials standard from Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), a consortium that includes the BBC along with tech companies including Adobe, Microsoft and Google. OpenAI has also adopted the standard for its Dall-E 3 model.
C2PA defines a secure way for metadata and an audit trail to be embedded into digital content including images, video, audio and documents. The author decides what metadata to include initially, and can edit the data too, but no other parties can change it.
Deborah Turness, CEO of BBC News, said in a blog post: "At BBC News we know that trust is earned. When our audiences know not just what we know, but how we know it, they feel they can trust our journalism even more.
"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. In a world of deep fakes, disinformation and distortion, this transparency is more important than ever."