  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.
