2024 Accelerator Project

Project Challenge Proposed by: BBC, Paramount   

Supported by Champions: BBC, EBU, TV2, Paramount Global, ITN, Transmixr, Media Cluster Norway, YLE, Channel 4, Associated Press, ETC (Entertainment Technology Centre), CBC, IET, Globo, 2G Digital, CBS News

Participants: Open Origins, Eluvio, Videntifier, HAND (Human and Digital), Nagra 

In March 2024, this extraordinary group of Accelerator Champions in the news broadcasting and agency sectors, put out a call to the industry. It wanted to see what could be done to better understand and combat fake news, disinformation and manipulation of news, videos images.  

It asked… how can we go about protecting ourselves and our audiences, without breaking our budgets?  How can we work with the same pace and precision? If technology can fool us all, can it protect us too?  

The fakes are getting better, the technology to make them is improving too and it’s getting easier and easier to use. The amount being produced is probably impossible to gather – a qualified guess puts the number of AI images generated at around 34 million a day. 

The project team set out to develop a comprehensive industry-wide understanding of the challenges faced today by all media outlets in identifying disinformation, helping audiences to identify trustworthy news, Info and images as well as the lengths that news organisations go to, to verify sources, authenticate reality and trace the provenance of content.   

The team looked to establish an initial premise on the most effective interventions and how news organisations can collaborate on making them work and understood along with some best practice guidelines on ways working together. 

 The project complemented and leaned into the work of key industry initiatives of late – such as C2PA and Project Origin – to explore real-world, practical efforts to benchmark truly global collaborative efforts and the value of sharing insights around best practices.  

The team split the project work into three sections:  

• Provenance: which looked at how to prove the origins of content and the benefits for content creators, journalists and audiences as well as some of the existing provenance solutions and standards.  

• Detection: Which considered the tools that exist to flag manipulated material., demonstrating what can currently be achieved in both video and still images in both these areas.  

• It also considered where to use Provenance and where to use Detection tools in the chain. 

• Collaboration & Information sharing; This was mainly editorial where editorial teams collaborated worldwide across newsrooms to collaboratively share insights and intelligence, and where necessary help others to verify, authenticate or debunk stories and images/ videos. Uniquely, seven global newsrooms participated in the initiative in Mid-August 2024. 

Among key conclusions reached and shared at IBC2024: 

• Fake content and disinformation spreads fastest on social media where it can gain huge traction without being debunked or taken down. 

• News organisations ignore most fake content. There is too much to debunk it all.  Directly speaking, a lot of it on social media isn’t very good yet – but that clearly won’t last. 

• Journalists operate with caution. Fake and genuine content is checked, taking time and allowing disinformation to spread through unverified means. Even when they do debunk the content, their primary publishing point probably isn’t the platform where it started 

• That means mis- and dis-information can spread without authoritative challenge, causing confusion and affecting narratives. 

Ultimately, the project team are aiming to continue this critical work, and made A CALL TO ARMS for the industry to join this effort: 

• We all need to work together closely to make sure everyone has access to information they can trust 

• We all need to develop a deeper understanding of the products and systems available to fight disinformation and fake content 

• AI generated fake content is getting increasingly hard to detect and easier to produce. 

Specifically, team is calling for:  

• Other broadcasters and news agencies to join the initiative, in an effort to resolve this faster and more efficiently to unite and agree on industry standards. C2PA, for example, will only work if it is broadly adopted and requested as a standard from end to end.  
• Social media and big tech companies to join the initiative. Trust wins hearts and minds. It is built through openness and transparency. The project aims to cut through disinformation together, without curtailing creativity and invention. 
• Product developers to join the initiative.  Share your expertise. This is not an opportunity for one upmanship. Help the sector to build a media ecosystem that everyone can believe in.  

All of us – all our audiences – all our societies - will benefit if that’s what happens. 

To find out more, or join the initiative email: accelerators@ibc.org  

See the project PoC, demonstration of a combination of Detection and Provenance tools and discussion at IBC2024 here, along with the presentation and a series of individual tools that were explored as part of the project.