I don't think cryptographic authentication will help very much.

It's probably safe to assume that most people susceptible to fake news are computer-illiterate. Or at least, not as technical as the HN crowd. Why would normal people suddenly start listening to some nerd mumbo-jumbo they don't understand?

Technical knowledge doesn't seem requisite. Only independent verifiability.

In the same way that signing keys are used by infrastructure & many who don't understand the nuances.

Ya you could get an end result where your video player included in the videos infos "officially verified by persons x y & z"

What if X, Y, and Z are within your own filter bubble and want you to believe the fake news?

I've been thinking about this and I think a tricky part is editing, since naturally people are going to want to edit the video for normal reasons but I think that will mess with the signature?

I guess you could always have the unedited version posted and verified, but that has its own difficulties too.

This is why a sort of chain of evidence would be required.

This has me thinking the cryptography of the future is going to get wildly complex.

I think audio/video authentication is gonna be huge also. One thought would be merkle proof of hashes of the keyframes and then a signature of the merkle root. drop that bad boy into an eos / eth contract.

The trickier thing (as with most applied crypto) is going to be who attests and what to.

For press briefing, chaining to something like a White House press root is feasible.

But what about "married congressperson caught in local hotel with fling"? Or in one-party consent states, secret recordings? Self-sign? Sign with news organization (those that still exist) after sharing additional documentation?

I think it may be the true use case for crypto.

Sybil problem still remains. blockchain history can be rewritten relatively cheaply if defense is controlled by an army of nodes under obfuscated control of a single entity or clique. even worse when blind faith is put into authenticity of such information.

Crypto(graphy) already has plenty of use cases. I think you're probably referring to cryptocurrencies/blockchains.

Yes I was using that as shorthand, thanks for clarification.

This is probably already happening with good old fashioned Photoshop (or not even that sometimes). For instance, when a Telegraph journalist mistook a photoshopped photo of Trump with a white supremacist for the real deal and tweeted it with the comment that "this isn't complicated"[1], I doubt many people who saw the original tweet even saw the correction[2]. Over 28,000 retweets for the original claim, under a thousand for the correction. This is about typical.

[1] http://archive.is/paG5C [2] https://twitter.com/rafsanchez/status/896654656348323841

As if "Photo OPs" haven't been essentially exploiting this principle for 100+ yrs.

This is nothing more than legacy media bemoaning that media production (and propaganda production) has now moved mainstream and is out of their control.

In the end its a good thing, having a "trusted news sources" is not a normative expectation to any critical thinking based society. Everything should be viewed critically and viewed somewhat suspiciously. The entire concept of "trusted news" only has real appeal to the intellectually lazy. There is no objective truth in matters of politics, economics, society. Having some class of companies designated as "Trusted" has 1000x scarier potential than "view everything as a potential political statement".

"A lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes."

One feature missing is a way to mark every account that tweeted the original but not the correction as an unreliable possible-troll.

This is not a prediction but I wonder if their proliferation could stretch the subconscious Overton Window. I think that’s where the Overton Window seems to operate.

This is exactly what is needed, and placed in phones at the chip level, ie photo authenticity certified by Samsung.