Truth crisis / In the face of fake news, deep fakes and the use of social media as a news source (half of UK adults use social media to keep up with the latest news, reported Ofcom last year) there is an obvious and urgent need for tools that verify and corroborate news stories and sources. While we have yet to see whether Canon’s Truthmark becomes a viable and long-term solution to the misuse of photos, it certainly taps into important issues for both photographers and members of the public.
While putting the onus on photographers to upload their own images and stories might seem like a drawback, in fact it empowers photographers who often find themselves powerless to stop people using their imagery to propagate false narratives. Truthmark shifts the agency back to the originator of the photo, and provides a direct channel for members of the public to hear directly from photographers about the image in question. The unique digital fingerprint tackles the issue of photo doctoring, and in the era of extremely convincing deep fake technology, it gives journalists a way to verify and analyse images before using them to support or illustrate a narrative.
Of course, Truthmark can’t stop people using images for misleading purposes; those who use this tool are likely to already be invested in establishing the true story behind a photograph, while those intent on spreading false information can continue to do so.
Trust crisis / Part of Canon’s strategy here, as the agency explained, is to rebuild trust among the general public, whose faith in photography may have been rocked by the frequent misuse and altering of imagery. As a leader in optical and imaging products, it’s important for Canon to position itself as a supporter of photographers and ‘truthtellers’; the brand seems to connect a loss of trust in photography/photographers with a lack of trust in its products. Protecting the integrity of those two things therefore protects the Canon brand.
Meanwhile, the issue of transparency and truth has only been exacerbated by the pandemic. As the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism Digital News Report 2020 outlines, Covid-19 has further ‘reinforced the need for reliable, accurate journalism that can inform and educate populations’, reminding us ‘how open we have become to conspiracies and misinformation’. In January, in a poll of 40 markets across six continents, the report found that only 38% of people ‘trust most news most of the time’ (down four percentage points from 2019) while more than half said they were concerned about ‘what is true or false on the internet when it comes to news’.
