Welcoming Agence France-Presse (AFP) to the CAI
By Santiago Lyon
When one of the world’s largest and most respected news agencies decided to join the Content Authenticity Initiative, we were naturally very excited! We are delighted to welcome Agence France-Presse (AFP) as a member of the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), joining the more than 375 other major media and technology companies in the fight against misinformation. AFP brings a long history of fact-based and award-winning journalism to the CAI. Additionally, they have led numerous innovative and groundbreaking technology-based photojournalism projects in partnership with Nikon, their main camera provider. (Nikon has also joined the CAI.)
We are very much looking forward to working with AFP on prototyping and implementing CAI technology. This consists of secure, tamper-evident metadata that accompanies images and other file types along their journey from capture, through editing to publication, showing the viewer where an image came from and what might have been done to it along the way.
Stéphane Arnaud, AFP’s Central Photo editor-in-chief said, “In a world where information is constantly questioned, providing a scientific solution that would make it possible for the public to indisputably see the origin of images is a valuable tool for our profession in the fight against fake news. The CAI’s work and its desire to involve all the players in the image creation process is very encouraging.”
AFP is one of the world’s leading news agencies, providing fast, comprehensive, and verified coverage of the events shaping our world and of the issues affecting our daily lives. Drawing from a large newsgathering network across 151 countries, AFP is also a world leader in monitoring online news content to investigate and disprove false information, focusing on items that can be harmful, impactful, and manipulative.
With 2,400 staff representing 100 different nationalities, AFP covers the world in six languages with a unique range of quality storytelling spanning video, text, photos, and graphics. Their work underpins the media ecosystem by providing consumer-facing news outlets around the world with timely and accurate coverage. We look forward to collaborating, and, as always, welcome all to join the CAI in our work on digital provenance and attribution.