AI generated image

BBC Media Action, the BBC’s international charity, and BBC Research & Development (BBC R&D) have worked with Ukrainian national broadcaster Suspilne Ukraine (Public) to launch a new ‘nutrition label’ for its content. This initiative looks forward to ensuring audiences receive information they can trust in wartime, as the Corporation has claimed in a statement.

The Content Credentials standard introduced by C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authentication) is an open international standard for tracking changes in digital content, created in response to AI generation of increasingly realistic images. These images are often manipulated in cases of wartime misinformation, making it hard for audiences to know who or what they can trust.

This Content Credential approach, now in beta testing, is designed to allow Suspilne website users to click to see the origin of images and videos, and if and how an item has been edited.

The BBC R&D team is a co-founding member of the Coalition and works with tech companies and broadcasters around the world in support of Content Credentials.

“Developing and helping to deploy this technology to the locations and situations that need it most is a core part of our project team’s mission in R&D. Suspilne’s use of C2PA cameras to capture cryptographically signed authentic content into a news publishing workflow is among the first of its kind, and we hope that the impact will extend into the rest of the news ecosystem”, explains Charlie Halford, a principal engineer with BBC R&D.

Drawing on its partnership with Suspilne Ukraine, BBC Media Action supported the implementation of the technology and worked alongside BBC R&D and engineering teams to integrate the approach into newsroom operations.

Additionally, BBC Media Action funded the purchase of two professional cameras with C2PA support and subscriptions to digital services for secure photo transfer and processing, with the intention of creating a ‘chain of trust’ from the first shot through to publication.

“This is the first technology project in Eastern Europe that protects original content and allows audiences to distinguish it from deepfakes. C2PA is an effective tool to counter disinformation and support transparency amid conflict and crisis, and Suspilne, as a long-time partner of BBC Media Action, is breaking new ground in building that trust with Ukrainian audiences”, shares Olga Sedova, Director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia at BBC Media Action.

Suspilne’s leaders remark that the project will be essential in embedding audience trust in the broadcaster’s production processes.

“Credibility is a fundamental value of Suspilne news, and we strengthen it with innovations. Behind the ‘cr’ mark there is a full-fledged trust infrastructure integrated into the production processes of Suspilne”, adds Mykola Chernotytskyi, Chairman of the Board of Suspilne Ukraine.

“Suspilne is focused on building its user experience for a new generation of interaction with digital products. Our task is to make the signals of the origin of content understandable and familiar elements of every news story for millions of users, building trust while ensuring our original content – across news, sports, culture, archives and children’s – is clearly identifiable”, concludes Kyrylo Iesin, head of the digital product development team at Suspilne Ukraine.

Engineering support for the implementation was provided by Tim Murphy, a community mentor at the Content Authenticity Initiative and co-founder of the Pixelstream platform, which is also used to verify signed content. SSL.com provided Suspilne with C2PA and CAWG (Creator Assertions Working Group) certificates free of charge.

The technology is now being integrated into Suspilne’s internal editorial processes and used in a beta function for images with ongoing testing to try to ensure the data is understandable to users before being extended to audio and video on suspilne.media.