Twitter joins the C2PA steering committee, furthering their commitment to scale trust in online content

By Andy Parsons, Content Authenticity Initiative Director

Today, our longtime partner and supporter Twitter continues to lead the way as a trailblazing platform in social media by joining the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). Twitter will join Adobe, Arm, BBC, Intel, Microsoft, and Truepic on the C2PA steering committee to further the work being done to scale transparency and trust in online content.

Twitter has long believed in our goal of creating an end-to-end content provenance system at scale, having been essential co-authors of our foundational technical white paper last summer. Their misinformation product manager Fabiana Azevedo spoke as a key voice at our December community event last year, focused on restoring trust in the age of nonstop information at our fingertips, with increasing amounts of it being mis- or disinformation. As open standards specification work shifts to the newly established C2PA organization, Twitter joining to bring their strong technical expertise marks a critical step forward for the community and ecosystem of content provenance.

Claire Leibowicz, head of the AI and Media Integrity Program at The Partnership on AI, wrote recently in her excellent piece in Tablet Magazine on the urgency of countering misinformation on social media: “By rigorously field-testing different approaches, social media platforms will be able to better determine what works and what doesn’t for any future provenance information infrastructure. More broadly, platforms should work alongside others in industry, civil society, and academia to embed additional signals of authenticity into the web.” This is precisely what both the C2PA and CAI aim to do with camera manufacturers, software companies, human rights groups, publishers, and social media platforms and what the addition of Twitter to the C2PA will further.

As previously announced, the C2PA is a Joint Development Foundation project formed to create open technical standards through a formal coalition of cross-industry companies. In a few short months, the C2PA has made significant headway: we continue to expand the broad group of contributing members, to establish relationships with complementary standards organizations, and to create specialized working groups with the aim of publicly releasing draft specifications later this year. Interested parties can apply to participate in the C2PA here. As the CAI foundational specification work is incubated under the C2PA, the CAI increases our focus on education, advocacy, collaborative prototyping of real-world use cases, and interoperability of tools to realize our vision of widely-adopted, cryptographically verifiable provenance.

Through both C2PA standards development and CAI community activities, we will together build a robust, cross-industry provenance solution to address misinformation. Twitter’s participation as a leader in the efforts, cemented today with C2PA membership, marks an important milestone on the journey to empowering consumers with transparency.