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，行业领袖和研究人员提出利用技术来源标准来应对通过数字修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可靠的来源信息（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，目前尚不清楚终端用户对来源信息的反应方式，以及如何最佳设计易于普通用户理解的来源标识。我们开展了一项在线实验，涵盖美国和英国的595名参与者，旨在探究来源信息如何改变用户对社交媒体上视觉内容的准确性感知和信任度。研究发现，来源信息通常会降低信任度，并引发用户对欺骗性媒体的质疑，尤其是在揭示媒体为合成内容时尤为显著。此外，我们还测试了来源信息本身不完整或无效的情况，并发现这些状态对参与者的准确性感知和媒体信任度有显著影响，在某些情况下甚至导致用户对诚实媒体产生不信任。研究结果表明，尽管来源具有启发性，但用户对其理解仍不充分，他们常将媒体可信度与来源可信度这一正交（尽管相关）概念相混淆。我们探讨了设计选择如何可能导致对来源的（误）解，并总结了其对可用来源系统的启示，包括更清晰的界面和用户教育。