When news breaks, photos are published on platforms instantly. Often, they are out of context, depicting real but non-related events. This can be done in good faith, or it can be done with the intent to manipulate.

Nonetheless, if the photos hit a nerve, they spread like wildfire and have the capacity to distort reality and create alternative narratives.

Now, add AI and deepfakes to this, and it is getting harder to distinguish what is real from what is not. Day by day, the trust embedded in a photo as a captured moment of a real event is slowly eroding.

Trust and transparency

This is the backdrop for a new function Schibsted is rolling out across newsrooms. With this function, we are creating a new layer of editorial judgement to the images we publish. Thus, we create transparency on the meticulous editorial processes behind verification and the editorial choices we make. To us, this transparency is an important building block for trust.

It all started as a workshop in the Trust Task Force of Schibsted, a group of representatives from the newsrooms and central functions tasked to oversee and drive initiatives at Schibsted to increase trust in news media.

Trust is one of Schibsted’s most important KPIs.

There are ongoing international and Norwegian-led initiatives to secure trust in photography – and media in general. The best known is the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, better known by its acronym C2PA. Its goal is to establish an international standard of cryptographic signage of content, where an image, for instance, is “stamped” in the camera when it is captured and also each time it goes through the editing process.

When published, all this meta-data follows the image and can be displayed with it, thus giving the end user credible proof of authenticity.

In Norway, Project Reynir, with support from news media, aims to create a chain of trust from publishers to the audience based on this provenance.

The Schibsted Trust Task Force is enthusiastic about implementing C2PA into our workflows and user-facing systems. Not only that, but we think it is an important thing to do. Schibsted’s own AI security threat report pinpoints the high and immediate risk of deepfakes on trust in our brands and recommends implementing digital content provenance to mitigate this risk.

But C2PA is not yet mature, and it is costly to implement. Schibsted’s product teams are also in a process of simplification and working with limited resources for huge side projects. Still, an innovative news media group like Schibsted should be at the forefront here.

Tracking trust

Schibsted’s own trust tracker survey shows users think Schibsted’s brands are weak at verifying that digital content is genuine. As newsroom representatives, we know the extensive processes in place to verify images and other digital content, but we have not been showing this process to our users.

Now, with the new functionality, we are starting to do this. Two new input fields in the content management system for editorial judgement allow title and text to be added.

When filled in, this information will be displayed below the images in the article. Now, information about the verification process, why we are anonymizing, and other editorial decisions can be explained in relation to and in context of the image itself.

Pulling our resources together, and having all brands and shared functions involved in the process and agreeing on the outcome, we managed to go from idea to production in just a couple of months.

This is just a start, and it is important that we do not stop here. Trust in editorial media and our content is about our future. We need to strengthen it.

Banner art: Adobe Stock by Denniro.

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