大象传媒

The people of the UK, having filled their Saturday nights with Zoom quizzes during a year of lockdown, must be at peak general knowledge. Earth’s distance from the sun? Easy. The third James Bond? A doddle. The novel that opens, "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Well that’s Pride and Prejudice, of course. A "truth universally acknowledged" though… that’s a thought to conjure with.

Our global democracies, our public discourse, even our notion of truth itself have taken a battering of late. That society is polarised may not be a bad thing - it can lead to engagement in key issues,  well forged compromises and invigorating debate. But polarisation is being sharpened by partisanship and as we’ve seen so clearly during the Covid crisis and the US election in particular, the partisans are being sold weaponised disinformation. Writing in The Guardian, free speech expert Timothy Garton Ash says "to survive, democracy needs a minimum of shared truth. With the storming of the Capitol in Washington on 6 January, the US showed us just how dangerous it is when millions of citizens are led to deny an important, carefully verified fact - namely, who won the election.”

Watching some elements of the media polarise around these ‘alternate facts’ is unedifying in itself. Taking an angle on a ’shared truth’ is one thing, propagating unequivocal untruths, quite another. We can, of course  learn to live with polarised media, to educate and inform ourselves and make the choices we feel comfortable with about what we consume. But if we can’t trust that journalism has reached us in the form it was intended to by those publishers we start to become unmoored. What CAN we believe? Should every scrap of content we encounter in our news feeds or have shared with us send us into research mode? This would be an unsettling and exhausting reality we need to do our best to avoid.

One of the tools we can deploy to help our audiences keep cool heads in this fevered climate is the digitally-secure provenance tracking of news stories. If we develop and deploy this we can secure the trust that needs to exist in robust journalism. Whatever happens as arguments swirl around  truth, the underpinning of trust in content integrity can be an anchor for our output in these turbulent waters. Project Origin was established to provide a platform for collaboration and discussion among a set of partners on the creation and adoption of a new media provenance tracking process. The initial effort is led by a coalition including the 大象传媒, CBC/Radio-Canada, Microsoft, and The New York Times.

Last month, the 大象传媒 teamed up with Microsoft, Adobe, Arm, Intel, and Truepic to create the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (). This Joint Development Foundation will set open standards to develop end-to-end technical specifications on content provenance and authentication. The standards will draw from two implementation efforts: Project Origin’s efforts on provenance for news publishing and the Content Authenticity Initiative (), which focuses on digital content attribution.

It’s easy to think of protective technologies as a cloak - something to shield or guard or circumscribe but what we’re doing with Origin and C2PA is exactly the opposite. 大象传媒 aims to remove defences - the defence of ignorance ‘I don’t know where this came from’ and obfuscation ‘it looked like something that might be true’ and shine a fact-based searchlight onto the inner workings of our fractured media ecosystem. At the same time, it’s important to bear in mind that we need to make our workflows as accessible as possible. Witness Director Sam Gregory’s involvement with our work has been invaluable, reminding us of the need to ensure that journalists working in difficult regimes and taking risks with their safety cannot afford the luxury of provenance signals. He adds "The risk is that the burden of proof further increases on those with least resources to match its demands.”

As the 大象传媒 plans for its next charter period its journalism is more important than ever.  In five years we’ll have had another UK and US election. Arguably the battle to debunk deepfakes or prevent their debunking will have been won - by the machines. Vaccine views will have become retrenched. Brexit will be nearly a decade old. It’s unlikely that passions will have dimmed and provenance by then could be even more vital. To ensure the success of our provenance work we’ll need to double down on the work we’re doing now - co-operation, collaboration and innovation to make it one of the rocks on which our journalism our trust and our shared truths can stand firm.

With thanks to 大象传媒’s Jatin Aythora, Sinead O’ Brien,  Judy Parnall, Charlie Halford and Nigel Earnshaw and Jamie Angus.