If confusion is the commodity, certainty is the premium product

"Ten years ago, I argued in a Nieman Lab prediction that we needed to demonstrate our care for our readers and journalism by implementing a much-needed layer of security to web content. The mission was to get to HTTPS everywhere, and to defend the digital pipeline that journalism's audience depended on from tampering. We succeeded at just the right moment."

"Consider Aesop's "The Boy Who Cried Wolf." In 2025-26, the Boy is an algorithm. He is flooding the village with toxic information - infinite slop and plausible deepfakes. And us? We are the villagers. We haven't stopped listening because the content is bad; we've stopped listening because the challenge of figuring out what is real has become too hard. This is the " Liar's Dividend.""

"If confusion is the commodity of the AI age, then certainty and trust are the premium products. There is a hard business case for this, and the industry has already taken note. Major news agencies are equipping staff with C2PA-enabled cameras from Leica, Sony, and Nikon (see Starling Lab, Canon, Reuters; Nikon and AFP; Sony and AP). The EBU and BBC are researching how to implement the same provenance technology for broadcast."

HTTPS adoption secured the transport layer for web journalism, protecting content in transit. The current threat is harmful content entering the information ecosystem, amplified by algorithms producing infinite synthetic and deceptive media. The 'Boy Who Cried Wolf' analogy illustrates how audiences stop trusting because distinguishing reality becomes too difficult, creating a 'Liar's Dividend' that erodes content value. Certainty and trust become scarce, monetizable commodities. Major news organizations are adopting C2PA-enabled capture devices and exploring provenance for broadcast to establish cryptographic proof of authenticity. Journalism must assume chain-of-custody responsibilities and implement visible cryptographic markers to prove media authenticity.

Read at Nieman Lab