Introduction to Cross-Media Authentication and Verification

Introduction

During the last decades, we have witnessed the digitization of media production that followed the tremendous evolution of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and their widespread adoption in the media business. Undoubtedly, this breakthrough has multi-laterally influenced the roles of journalists, communication professionals and media organizations, as well as their relationships with the end-users and the audience (Kalliris & Dimoulas, 2009). New tools and capabilities have been precipitated, transforming the media landscape with remarkably expeditious research progress, which is still in process. Among others, social media, web and generally ICT services have affected the ways that users are engaged in informing and mass communicating scenarios, where all news /content producing, accessing /browsing and “consuming” services co-exist (Dimoulas & Symeonidis, 2015; Katsaounidou & Dimoulas, 2018; Kotsakis, Kalliris, & Dimoulas, 2012; Spyridou, Matsiola, Veglis, Kalliris, & Dimoulas, 2013; Veglis, Dimoulas, & Kalliris, 2016). The vast expansion in the usage and the capabilities of contemporary mobile devices (i.e. smartphones and tablets) have fueled the materialization of the “information at my finger tip” vision, further advancing flexibility and mobility of both users and services, which can now be launched independently of time and space (Dimoulas, Veglis, & Kalliris, 2014, 2015, 2018; Satyanarayanan, Bahl, Caceres, & Davies, 2009). The proliferation of user-friendly (mobile) multimedia capturing and processing tools have extended the potentials of searching and sharing information, allowing regular users to produce and edit content online, with almost no expense. Hence, the so-called User Generated Content (UGC) has overwhelmed the Internet and social networks, usually having the form of multimodal entities (text, image, audio, video, etc.), which can be combined and propagated in innumerous ways (Dimoulas & Symeonidis, 2015; Dimoulas et al., 2014, 2015, 2018; Katsaounidou & Dimoulas, 2018; Kotsakis et al., 2012; Matsiola, Dimoulas, Kalliris, & Veglis, 2015; Veglis et al., 2016).

Except for the benefits that ICTs and digital revolution have offered to the media industry, there are certain arising issues related to the validity and integrity of the multimodal information that is exchanged through the available media channels. Hence, part of the posted, shared and/or re-published information may be opinionated, sensationalized, misleading, unverified, manipulated or otherwise unreliable. Misinformation has social and economic consequences in all areas of human activity, with serious and, in any case, interesting political implications. This is also one of the reasons explaining why much ongoing research is currently being directed toward the underlying causes and consequences of fake news, where the investigation of preventing measures and practices has major importance. While outstanding progress has been conducted in research terms through the implementation of content tampering detection algorithms and strategies, an integrated methodology is still missing to properly address all the aspects of news and information authentication, taking advantage of all the available modalities (Katsaounidou & Dimoulas, 2018). Considering that publishing in multiple media is nowadays the common place, multimodal authenticity features can be detected and extracted by evaluating the differences between the cross-media publishing versions of a story (Dimoulas et al., 2014, 2015, 2018; Matsiola et al., 2015; Lu, Jin, Su, Shivakumara, & Tan, 2015; Veglis et all., 2016). This also stands as the main objective of the current book, which aims at revealing the potentials of multi-channel media storytelling attributes, thus transforming them into innovative cross-media veracity solutions.