News Labels May Create a False Sense of Security

A small label on a news image can confirm its documented history, but readers may treat it as something more: a recommendation to trust the source. That is the warning from Christoph Trattner, an information-science professor at the University of Bergen and head of MediaFutures.

More news images are now receiving a “Content Credential” based on the C2PA standard, backed by Adobe, Microsoft and the BBC. Clicking the label can show who created the image, when and with what equipment, as well as what happened to it afterward.

Trattner compares these labels with Norway’s Keyhole food label, which lets shoppers identify healthier products without reading the details. Food labels work because decades of nutritional research establish measurable risks and broad agreement. Journalism has no equally simple set of ingredients. Whether cropping an image is problematic depends on what was removed and why. The same label can appear on a genuine press photograph and a fully generated illustration, leaving the crucial distinction in details that readers must know how to interpret.

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A declaration functioned as a recommendation.

The need for such systems has grown as trust in news has fallen to 37 percent globally, its lowest level in the Reuters Institute’s measurements since 2015. Artificial intelligence has also made it increasingly difficult to distinguish real images from generated ones. The media industry will discuss provenance marking at the Media Provenance Summit in Bergen on September 22.

In an experiment with 6,114 participants in Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States, C2PA labels increased trust not only in images but also in the news sources behind them, especially sources that participants trusted least. Trattner says the label confirmed one fact, an image’s documented history, while readers inferred another: that the source was reliable.

He rejects the idea of giving news organizations a trust score. People’s trust can be measured, he argues, but that does not show whether the trust is deserved. Such a score could recycle old reputations or give whoever controls it excessive power over the public sphere. The labels, he says, should first make clear what they are: an ingredient list, not a seal of approval.

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We roll out ingredient lists and let people read them as health stamps.