A person is scrolling through social media and stops on a video of a real human being making a plausible claim. Nothing about the clip looks obviously fake. The lighting feels normal. The voice sounds right. It may even be genuine footage.
How does that person decide whether to believe it?
That is the real question now: not whether media can be manipulated—we already know it can. Not whether synthetic media will continue to improve; it will. The harder question is how belief gets formed when authentic-looking media is abundant and context is fragile amid constant technological innovation.
Since my column “Content Provenance: Audience Trust Is at Stake” in the December issue of TV Tech was published, confidence in the telecom sector continues to fall. According to a 2025 Gallup poll, a record-low 28% of Americans expressed a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in mass media (see chart below). The conversation around the importance of the verifiability of content authenticity, i.e. content provenance, has become pivotal.
This article does not argue that provenance can solve the trust problem; that challenge depends on a multitude of factors, including effective marketing, brand and customer strategy, as well as human emotion, environment and temperament. Rather, we argue that provenance is now a necessary infrastructure for making digital content more transparent and defensible. The need for authenticity is not coming soon; it is already here.
Over the past two years, meaningful progress has been made on provenance technology. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) is an industry standard for attaching provenance metadata to digital content so people can verify where media came from and whether it has been edited. It has become the center of gravity for content credentials.
As synthetic media becomes easier to create, and AI-generated images and videos become more commonplace, regulators are beginning to insist on machine-readable transparency. Article 50 of the European Union AI Act becomes enforceable on Aug. 2, and California’s AI transparency rules are moving in a similar direction. For media companies, provenance is more than a best practice. It is a capability they will need to operationalize.
Why Trust Cannot Be Engineered
People trust institutions. They trust familiar people. They trust sources their communities already recognize. They trust what aligns with their prior experiences more readily than what disrupts them. And while technology may modify some of these patterns, it does not replace them.
This is why propaganda still works in a world where authenticity tools are improving. A message does not need to be fake to be manipulative. It only needs to be framed effectively, repeated often enough and delivered by a messenger the audience is predisposed to trust. Conversely, a piece of information can be authentic in a narrow technical sense and still mislead. A real clip can be selectively edited. A true quote can be stripped of context. A genuine image can imply something false.
The easiest way to think about provenance is through three different lenses: legal, reputational and value-based.
Legal trust is the strongest case for the technology and, frankly, one of the main reasons it exists. Who created the file? Who must get paid for use of this asset? Has it been altered? What is the chain of custody? Can any of that be demonstrated in a dispute, an audit, a rights conflict, or a regulatory inquiry?
On these questions, C2PA and related content credentials are genuinely useful infrastructure. They add standardized and cryptographically protected information to digital assets.
The second bucket is reputational trust, or the court of public opinion. Here, provenance helps by signaling that an organization is willing to stand behind content and make parts of the editorial or creation trail more transparent. The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) work regarding verified news publishers and publisher certificates is important for exactly this reason.
It begins to create a more formal publisher identity layer on top of the general provenance standard. In effect, it says not just “this file has a credentials record,” but “this file came from a verified news entity.” That is useful reputationally, even if it is not the same thing as proving the underlying claims are true.
The third bucket is human trust. This is the hard one. It determines whether the audience believes what it is seeing. This is where the technology has the weakest effect, not because it is weak technology but because belief is not a technical factor.
The distinction matters most in news, where user-generated content is often the most urgent problem. Broadcasters know this instinctively. The footage that creates the greatest verification pressure is usually not the footage they shot themselves. It is the clip sent by a bystander, witness, or anonymous social account.
This is the core limitation that provenance cannot solve.
C2PA is designed to certify the history of content, not its inherent truthfulness. It can help establish where a file came from and whether its recorded history has been altered. It does not determine whether the message is honest, persuasive, manipulative or fair. It is a transparency layer, not a truth engine.
The news industry has been dealing with versions of this problem for years. User-generated content has long been highly valuable and highly risky. It feels authentic because it is often captured by real people in real moments. But that makes it easy to over-trust. “Shot by a real person” is not the same thing as “reliably framed,” “fully contextualized” or “immune from manipulation.” In some ways, that is precisely why provenance matters. In other ways, it is precisely why provenance is not a silver bullet.
AI Makes the Problem More Visible
AI has not so much created the trust problem as made it harder to ignore. For broadcasters, the more immediate issue is not whether AI can generate convincing content. It is how to preserve confidence in the provenance of content as it moves through increasingly complex production and distribution chains.
The healthiest relationship with provenance is pragmatic: use it to strengthen verification, not to outsource judgment.
That becomes especially important in broadcasting because the chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Content may be signed at capture, but downstream platforms and intermediaries can still strip or distort metadata during re-encoding or distribution. In practice, that means provenance can disappear before the audience ever sees it. For broadcasters, that means provenance technologies cannot be treated as a point solution. It must be operationalized across capture, editing, publishing, metadata management and governance.
C2PA is not a trust substitute. It is an enterprise capability that supports trust at scale.
The future is unlikely to produce a universal trust layer that makes belief automatic. That is asking too much of any technology. What it can do is provide better information.
For media executives, this creates a practical agenda.
First, treat provenance as infrastructure. Second, start where the risk is highest, especially around UGC and breaking news workflows. Third, build governance around what you capture, expose and retain. And fourth, prepare for provenance to become part of compliance architecture, not just editorial experimentation.
That is where the real opportunity lies. Not in claiming technology can manufacture trust, but in building systems that make trust easier to earn and easier to defend.
Technology can tell us where information came from. It cannot tell us what to believe. Even if it could tell us what to believe, would we?
Micky Silverman is a senior manager in Deloitte’s M&E practice who has worked for the past decade across traditional linear television providers, over-the-top media services, and major social media platforms, advising companies on their content strategy, product development and business operations. He can be reached via TV Tech.
Shelly Michael is a consultant in Deloitte’s Technology, Media and Telecommunications sector. She can be reached via TV Tech.
