Media Provenance

Knowing where media came from is often more important than knowing what the media contains:

• In cases like Deep Fakes and Manipulated Media, one of the best signals we have for veracity is the source of media, and where it showed up first. The credibility/plausibility of the initial poster having access to the media is a fabulous analogy for the plausibility of the media itself.
• In cases like Child Sexual Abuse Material or Election Misinformation, knowing the original poster of the content can help authorities track the content back to its source. In the case of the former, that can often lead to the rescue children from sexual abuse, in the case of the latter it can lead to the prosecution of people who try to disenfranchise at scale.
• In cases like Health Misinformation, giving users easy access to provenance information can help users understand where the information is coming from, and assist them track down sources to try to understand their authenticity.

Platforms can make each of these outcomes more likely by retaining records along the line of a "chain of custody" - how did user X end up sharing/posting/sending message Y. This is particularly important in situations where re-shares, screenshots, and other forms of reposting can easily obscure the original author of content. Similarly, platforms could create reverse-content-search tools to empower users to find the first post in which a piece of media appears.

When platforms offer tools to enable the investigation of provenance, they're empowering users to better discern between truth and fiction, and giving authorities the capacity to assign blame for illegal content, ultimately enabling less harm to occur through their platform.