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：摘要：近年来，行业领袖与研究者提议采用技术溯源标准来应对通过数字篡改媒体传播的视觉虚假信息。通过向媒体元数据添加作者署名、编辑日期等不可篡改且安全的溯源信息，社交媒体用户或能更有效地评估所接触媒体的真实性。然而，终端用户如何响应溯源信息，以及如何最优设计用户可理解的溯源指示器尚不明确。我们对来自美国和英国的595名参与者开展了在线实验，探究溯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，溯源信息通常会降低信任度，并促使用户质疑欺骗性媒体，尤其是在揭示媒体为合成作品时。我们进一步测试了溯源信息本身显示不完整或无效的情况，发现这些状态显著影响参与者对媒体的准确性感知与信任，甚至在某些情况下导致其不信任诚实媒体。研究结果表明，尽管溯源具有启发性，但用户仍未能充分理解这一概念，常将媒体可信度与正交（虽相关）的溯源可信度概念相混淆。我们探讨了设计选择可能如何导致对溯源的（误）解，并总结了对可用溯源系统的启示，包括更清晰的界面设计与用户教育。