1. médialab Sciences Po
  2. Activities
  3. Provenance Tagging and the Politics of Content Trust

Provenance Tagging and the Politics of Content Trust

How can provenance data reshape trust in digital information?

Research

As digital misinformation circulates with increasing ease, new tools are being developed to help users identify where content comes from and how it was created. The Provenance programme brings together media practitioners, technologists, policy actors, and researchers to develop and evaluate provenance tagging—tools that make the origins and transformations of digital content traceable. Funded by the French Ministry of Culture through the FSEIP initiative, the programme supports a consortium of partners—including the startups TrustMyContent and UncovAI, which provide provenance labelling and AI-detection solutions, the developer collective L’Atelier, and the médialab at Sciences Po—working together to design, implement, and assess operational tools for trustworthy digital content.

The médialab leads the experimental research component of the project. In collaboration with NYU Abu Dhabi and the University of Bern, we examine how provenance indicators affect users’ trust and sharing of digital content. Our cross-country studies investigate the conditions under which these technologies foster credibility, and aim to identify not only their effectiveness, but also their limits and unintended consequences. More broadly, the project reflects on how infrastructures of authenticity intervene in everyday judgments of reliability and shape emerging forms of digital information governance.