What’s the news: Microsoft announced it will be extending its Content Integrity tools service to European Union (EU) political parties as well as campaigns and news organizations from around the world. This is the same service that was announced in November 2023 for US election candidates, allowing them to digitally sign and authenticate content through digital watermarking.
“Microsoft built its Content Integrity tools to help organizations such as political campaigns and newsrooms send a signal that the content someone sees online is verifiably from their organization. These tools, already available to U.S. political campaigns, give organizations control over their own content, and combat the risks of AI-generated content and deepfakes,” said the Microsoft blog.
Content Integrity tools offers platforms for fact-checking: Microsoft said the content integrity tool consists of three components:
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An easy-to-use private web application available to political campaigns, news organizations, and election officials so they can add Content Credentials to their owned, authoritative content
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A private mobile application to capture secure and authenticated photographs, video, and audio by adding Content Credentials in real-time from a smartphone, developed in partnership with Truepic
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A public website for factcheckers and any member of the public to check images, audio, or videos for the existence of Content Credentials
The post said attaching Content Credentials to original media helps organizations increase transparency as to “who created or published an image, where and when content was created, whether it was generated by AI, and whether the image has been edited or tampered with since it was created.”
“When people see media with valid Content Credentials, they can be certain that the content was in fact released by the newsroom, campaign, or political party. And they can understand whether the media has been altered in any way because they can see the editing history from the time that the organization added Content Credentials. This is made possible by leveraging the open-source industry standard published by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). These tools will be made available in private preview at no cost through 2024,” said the blog.
Flood of deep fake content can influence Indian voters
During MediaNama’s Deep Fakes and Democracy event, Shivam Shankar Singh, Data Analyst and Campaign Consultant, spoke about how the real danger of deep fake content in India is that the media makes it easier for political parties to flood a social media platform user’s timeline and change their perception of reality. Regarding disinformation by political parties, he said, “It’s a narrative that you’re [the political party] trying to build. When you try to do that, the quality itself of the content doesn’t really matter that much. What matters a lot more is the quantity. You want to flood a person’s feed with content that pushes the person in a certain belief system in a certain direction,” Singh explained. As a solution to tackling such issues, another speaker Tarunima Prabhakar, Co-Founder of Tattle Civic Technologies, said the Election Commission of India should have the capacity to track what is already in its code of conduct to capture violations around misinformation.
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