Assisted Authentication

The present chapter deals with the issue of information manipulation detection from an algorithmic point of view, examining a variety of authentication methods, which target assisting average users and media professionals to secure themselves from forged content. The specific domain forms a very interesting, highly interdisciplinary research field, where remarkable progress has been conducted during the last years. The chapter outlines the current state of the art, providing an overview of the different modalities, aiming at evaluating the various types of digital data (text, image, audio, video), in conjunction with the associated falsification attacks and the available forensic investigation tools. In the coming years, the problem of fake news is expected to become even more complicated, as journalism is heading towards an era of heightened automation. Overall, it is anticipated that machine-driven verification assistance means can speed up the required validation processes, reducing the spread of unverified reports.

Media Authenticity and Journalism

The evolution of information and communications technologies (ICTs) had a strong positive impact in the media world, and especially in the arrival of the participatory and citizens' journalism paradigms. However, this progress was also marked by the explosion of content tampering and forgery attempts by the dissemination of false informatory data. Verification strategies and initiatives to prevent misinformation were introduced along with the advent of ICTs, aiming at shielding and resurfacing the essence of verification ethics. Based on the principle that information has to be validated before its channeling into journalistic pipelines, the present chapter investigates the trust between news outlets and audience. In specific, the lost “faith” in the media ecosystem is highlighted, focusing on the primary significance that truth holds along the end-to-end newsgathering and publishing processes.

Cross-Media Publishing and Storytelling

Technological evolution on digital content processing and mediated communication has created multiple publication means, which can be employed for information channeling and dissemination. The present chapter analyzes in detail the important topic of cross-media publishing and storytelling that resulted in changes in the news reporting chain and created new ways of making journalism. It also involved fundamental changes in both ends of media production and consumption and consequently in the way that informing streams arrive to the end users. Taking into consideration that journalistic organizations utilize all the available propagation paths to spread their product, this section discusses the historic evolution of cross-media, defining multi-channel publishing procedures and presenting the various devices which can be utilized as receiving terminals. As a final point, the cross-modal attributes of the presented paradigms are studied for their potential usefulness in multimodal integrated authentication solutions.

Misinformation via Tampered Multimedia Content

The present chapter investigates the use of multiple resources/modalities (text, audio, images, video, etc.) as evidence in journalism (i.e., documenting the associated articles). Indeed, multimedia assets are essential components of the professional news coverage, considering their ability to captivate enormous and complex amounts of data more rapidly (than reading the elongated plain text). Hence, the narration becomes vivid, representative, and attractive, while answering all the involved “questions” that surround a report (i.e., who, what, where, when, why, the so-called five Ws of journalism). However, their proofing attributes can be used in the reverse order (i.e., for applying content tampering), thus creating falsified documents to support and propagate untrue stories. Nowadays, user-friendly tools facilitate textual and audiovisual editing operations, easing the forgery processes even for the average user. This chapter analyzes the role of rich media in engaging infotainment services and their side effects in misinformation propagation.

Introduction to Cross-Media Authentication and Verification

The current chapter provides an overview of the objectives being covered in this book, introducing the reader to the values of cross-media authentication in journalism and generally in informing services. Misinformation has social and economic consequences in every aspect of human activity, with critical political implication. The dominance of cross-media publishing and storytelling and the contemporary forms of digital journalism have shaped a new media landscape, raising certain question regarding the applied authentication and verification strategies. While media veracity has received a lot of attention during the last years, content verification practices need to be further supported, adapting to the diverse character of multiple media and sources. The utmost goal of this introductory chapter is to unveil the potentials of an interdisciplinary exploitation of current advantages in multi-channel storytelling and their integration in cross-media veracity strategies, where best practices can be combined with state-of-the-art computational technologies and algorithmic solutions.

Cross-Media Authentication and Verification

The present chapter outlines the potentials of cross-media authentication solutions by correlating all the available information streams involved in multiple media (i.e., content/channel-adapted modalities, linking mechanisms, users' feedback, metadata). The proposed model attempts to thoroughly analyze the existed (and detected) diversities, aiming at seeking for “consistent inconsistencies” (i.e., specific dissimilarities that are proportionately steady in most “comparison pairs”). Full range of forgery detection strategies are taken into consideration (i.e., best practices adopted by humans, algorithms, and intelligent systems implemented through machine learning, their dynamic combination, etc.). Thus, the current framework ventures to concatenate all the involved approaches, which are related to both multiple publishing channels and news verification. Hence, the “cross-media” term has a broader meaning, encapsulating the sub-cases of cross-/trans-media publishing and storytelling, with respect to cross-validation of information, along with the entire landscape of digital media.

The Transforming Media Landscape

During the last decades, the digital revolution that we have all experienced through the widespread deployment of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has multilaterally influenced individual's perception about significant aspects of everyday life. Among others, the massive adoption of internet technologies and the transition to the Web 2.0/3.0 paradigms (and beyond) have shaped a dynamically changing media environment. As a result, new forms of journalism and mass communication have been launched and are currently available, promoting the so-called citizen and participatory journalism models, where user generated content (UGC) is dominant. The arising issue is that part of the propagated information may be subjective, manipulated, and/or unreliable, which is further deteriorated by the lack of confidence of many average users within the new digital environment. The present chapter attempts to enlighten the correlations between the rapidly transforming media landscape and its unwanted effect on news and content tampering.

Authentication by Humans

The present chapter investigates the involvement of the human factor in news evaluation procedures. Indeed, the “wise” crowd is an essential component of the verification practices, although there are continuously arising automated processes in the related research field (digital forensics). The idea of validating events using individuals' advantages (rational judgment, criticism, physical presence) is not new, since audience has always influenced the published stories regarding their formulation and perception. It is no coincidence that the term “collective intelligence” has been used for many years. Furthermore, this section of the book attempts to provide an overview of the fact-checking procedures, while utilizing the capabilities of Semantic Web and the developed initiatives around the world regarding authentication. The utmost goal of the chapter is to highlight that people hold a crucial role in in the dissemination of misleading information, but also in detecting, flagging, and debunking.