One Step Communicators Can Take to Stop Disinformation is to Authenticate Content
The Institute for Public Relations’ Disinformation Awareness Commitment asks communicators to actively combat disinformation by promoting accuracy, media literacy and accountability. It’s an important and laudable goal.
IPR’s initiative reflects an ongoing focus by the communications industry to address disinformation that undermines institutions, elections, traditional media and the truth itself.
Communicators have a stake in the game. If communications from agencies and companies are to be believed, it is in our best interest to ensure the industry upholds the highest professional standards of fact-based information. One principle of Page, a community of the world’s leading communicators, has always been the simple declarative: “Tell the truth.”
PR professionals cannot eliminate disinformation writ large. But there are specific communications-related challenges that are solvable and well within our scope.
Imposter and fake content—part of the disinformation spectrum—are a significant concern for companies. With artificial intelligence making it easier to create and disseminate facsimiles of high-value content, including press releases, opinion articles or white papers, there is a growing risk of financial and reputational damage from malicious actors. With the hacking of emails, social media accounts and AI-generated websites, the vehicles for content dissemination can no longer be considered truly secure.
Content provenance authentication provides an important new layer of digital security. This is being championed by the Content Authenticity Initiative, a group that includes the world’s largest technology and media companies.
Content provenance credentials help protect against digital fraud by incorporating the identity of the content creators—companies or individuals—into documents to help third parties know the content can be trusted. It works in the same way that individual humans are linked to IDs or passports.
As a member of CAI, Tauth.io is focused on bringing content authentication to the communications industry. We use C2PA industry-standard authentication protocols to incorporate content credentials into press releases and other high-value documents.
In addition to digitally signing documents and creating robust digital watermarks, we use blockchain to log content, providing the highest level of transparency and auditability of authenticated content. This ensures that wherever a document, video, audio or any digital content is sent or posted, the embedded provenance can be verified by the recipient by clicking the credentials link.
We develop customized content credentials for brands and help them manage their repository of blockchain hashes for authenticated content. It’s important to recognize that content is not stored on the blockchain—just a digital manifest of key information linked to it. This is an approach that in the past has only been available to a handful of governments.
Putting this in the context of communications: If a press release has been authenticated, a journalist will have the ability to verify that it was produced by the company issuing it. If they receive a release that does not have credentials, they will know to question its authenticity before running a story.
Incorporating content provenance authentication is a key step corporate communications and agency leaders can take to dramatically reduce the risk of disinformation from fake or imposter content. As a senior executive at a leading media company recently shared, “In three years we will be wondering how it was possible that content credentials were not included in digital documents!”
Tackling disinformation is a long-term societal project. Using tools to ensure that your content is protected against the risk of fake or imposter content is something communicators can do to address the problem of disinformation at an industry level.
