Global tech, media cos team up to check misinformation, fake content

A group of global technology and media companies have banded together to set up the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) to develop technical standards for certifying source and provenance of media content. 

Set up as a joint development foundation corporate structure, C2PA will  address disinformation, misinformation and online content fraud through its technical specifications, according to a statement from Microsoft.

Adobe, Arm, BBC, Intel, Microsoft and photo verification platform Truepic -- founding member companies of the consortium -- will create an open standard platform to develop specifications for images, video, audio and documents. 

The open standard platform can be adopted by any online platform and can be used by publishers, creators and consumers to trace the origin of any media content, the statement said. 

Technical specifications will include  defining what information is associated with each type of asset, how the information is presented and stored and how evidence of tampering can be identified. 

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The coalition brings together the founding members of Content Authenticity Initiative led by Adobe and Microsoft and BBC’s Project origin initiative under a single entity. 

“There’s a critical need to address widespread deception in online content -- now supercharged by advances in AI and graphics and diffused rapidly via the internet,” Eric Horvitz, chief scientific officer and Project Origin executive sponsor at Microsoft, said. 

C2PA will drive an end-to-end experience from the capturing device to the information consumer and include various types of media at scale.