Towards a Prototype to Leverage Archival Diplomatics to Develop a Framework to Detect and Prevent Fake Videos

This paper is about the trustworthiness, particularly authenticity, of videos produced and posted by citizen journalists. An archival diplomatics perspective is adopted. It focuses, among other things, on authentication by means of assessment of the form of records rather than simply their content. First, we focus on a study examining whether citizen journalists can ascertain if a news video is fake. The results of that study informed an approach to automate the assessment of a news video’s authenticity, building on archival diplomatics’ principles and methods of formal analysis. The study data and a set of authenticity criteria are then modeled into a knowledge graph. We suggest that graph analytics techniques may complement archival diplomatics in helping to assess the authenticity of videos. They can produce relative authenticity scores that may help computational archivists and others appraise the veracity and authenticity, of multi-media records with precision.