In recent years, industry leaders and researchers have proposed to use technical provenance standards to address visual misinformation spread through digitally altered media. By adding immutable and secure provenance information such as authorship and edit date to media metadata, social media users could potentially better assess the validity of the media they encounter. However, it is unclear how end users would respond to provenance information, or how to best design provenance indicators to be understandable to laypeople. We conducted an online experiment with 595 participants from the US and UK to investigate how provenance information altered users' accuracy perceptions and trust in visual content shared on social media. We found that provenance information often lowered trust and caused users to doubt deceptive media, particularly when it revealed that the media was composited. We additionally tested conditions where the provenance information itself was shown to be incomplete or invalid, and found that these states have a significant impact on participants' accuracy perceptions and trust in media, leading them, in some cases, to disbelieve honest media. Our findings show that provenance, although enlightening, is still not a concept well-understood by users, who confuse media credibility with the orthogonal (albeit related) concept of provenance credibility. We discuss how design choices may contribute to provenance (mis)understanding, and conclude with implications for usable provenance systems, including clearer interfaces and user education.

翻译：近年来，行业领袖和研究者提出利用技术性来源标准来应对通过数字篡改媒体传播的视觉虚假信息。通过在媒体元数据中添加不可篡改且安全的来源信息（如作者和编辑日期），社交媒体用户或许能更好地评估所遇媒体的真实性。然而，终端用户对来源信息的反应尚不明确，如何最佳设计便于普通人理解的来源标识也仍是未知。我们进行了一项涉及英美595名参与者的在线实验，探究来源信息如何改变用户对社交媒体上共享视觉内容的准确性感知与信任。研究发现，来源信息常会降低信任度，并引导用户质疑欺骗性媒体，尤其是当信息揭示媒体内容经过合成时。此外，我们测试了来源信息本身显示为不完整或无效的条件，发现这些状态显著影响参与者对媒体的准确性感知和信任，在某些情况下甚至导致他们对真实媒体产生怀疑。结果表明，来源虽然具有启发性，但用户仍未能充分理解这一概念，他们常将媒体可信度与来源可信度（虽相关但正交的概念）混淆。我们讨论了设计选择如何导致对来源的（误解），并针对可用来源系统提出启示，包括更清晰的界面和用户教育。