Trust Signals from Singapore, Content Authentication, and Discoverability
In a world in which AI is scaling misinformation and shadow content, clients, consumers, and the internet infrastructure need know what can be trusted.
As communicators, we build trust signals into content without necessarily thinking about it. Company logos, company emails, high-quality branding, and identity verification of social media addresses are used by clients and audiences to make decisions about whether to engage.
In a generative-AI world, this is no longer enough. Content that looks authentic is being used to mislead, manipulate markets, and defraud. This is a $500 billion-dollar-a-year problem. Combined with the sophisticated use of social engineering, companies, the media, and consumers are being challenged every day to decide what to trust and what not to trust.
Pope Leo's encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity,” which highlights our responsibility to protect what is real, underscores the moral dimension to this issue.
Communications from America’s largest banks that tell consumers not to trust websites, emails, texts and other content underscore how much of an issue this is. And, as Singapore’s Minister of State for Digital Development and Information, Jasmin Lau, recently shared at the Content Authentication Summit in Singapore, there is a rising level of government concern. The City State is very focused on the growing need to protect its population from misinformation and fraud.
At the Summit, and at a breakfast roundtable organized by Tauth Labs with the Page Society for communications leaders in Singapore, the role of content authentication as a foundational technology to meet these new challenges was addressed.
Leaders from the BBC and the International Press Telecommunications Council shared at the breakfast, that authenticating content would put it on a fast track for journalists. And, Santiago Lyon, the Content Authenticity Initiative’s head of advocacy and education, framed authentication as a nutrition label which shows the origin of content and its ingredients. This provides the ability for audiences to know what they can trust when it is shared.
Among the points I highlighted was the value of authenticating documents, including press releases, financial communications, articles, and marketing materials - to not only protect brands and clients from reputational or bottom-line impacts, but to build in a trust signal to increase the value and discoverability of content. This helps humans, search engines, and LLMs prioritize authentic communications.
The best analog for the benefits of this is the shift from http to https, in which websites with security certificates are prioritized over those that do not have them, creating a safer internet.
There was an additional takeaway from discussions in Singapore, one that builds on the framing for brand safety I have written about previously in CommPRO: Protect, Detect and Correct. It is that the “protect” dimension of content authentication needs to be the starting point. It’s preventative step that makes it less likely that misinformation and shadow content will be acted upon and shared. It’s the classic ounce of prevention over a pound of cure.
Despite the broad recognition that detection is far from perfect, the ability to identify misinformation and shadow content is an additional - and essential - layer of brand safety. On the “correct” part of the framing, communicators need to consider both technology and communications fixes.
The idea that content authentication both builds trust into content in a way that makes clients and audiences more likely to act on it, and less likely that they'll fall prey to fraudulent content, is increasingly understood. That it is at the same time a powerful trust signal for digital infrastructure to make it more discoverable in the digital landscape is perhaps the most important takeaway from Singapore.
As companies focus on atomizing content to make it more digestible by LLMs, it is clear that efforts to game the system are being tackled by Google and LLMs, which are focused on identifying and prioritizing high-value sources of authentic and verified content.
As Larry Weber shared on CommPRO’s recent townhall on trust, AI and reputation, we are in a new golden age of earned media, because of the value placed on content from credible sources. Five Blocks’ Sam Michelson, an expert and leader in AI and reputation management, noted that his focus was on narrative storytelling, not chunking content.
Underpinning these communications approaches to visibility is the need for technology solutions. In this context, content authentication is not only key to protecting companies, clients and consumers from shadow content, the trust signal it embeds is making it more likely for it to be found, shared and trusted.
In you are in Washington on June 9, join us for a breakfast discussion of communications approaches to build narrative authority and content authentication to build a “Trust Stack.” Find out more and RSVP here.
