Trust and authenticity in digital communication: enabling transparent and accountable Institutions
Arbor Media
Session 359
Public institutions are facing a trust challenge. Citizens increasingly expect transparency, accountability, and direct access to information. At the same time, public institutions operate in an environment where misinformation, manipulated content, and declining trust have become significant challenges.
The paradox is clear: institutions are carrying out essential work that affects democracy, justice, and public administration every day, yet much of this work remains invisible to the public. Transparency is no longer just about publishing documents; it is about providing trustworthy, understandable, and verifiable access to institutional processes.
The digital transformation has fundamentally changed expectations. People expect live access, on-demand information, multilingual content, AI-powered search, and immediate availability across multiple channels. Modern audiences no longer distinguish between institutional communication and the digital experiences they receive from commercial platforms.
However, digital content introduces a new question: can people trust what they see? Advances in AI have made synthetic media and manipulated video increasingly convincing. For courts, parliaments, governments, and international organisations, ensuring the authenticity and integrity of audiovisual records is becoming as important as making them accessible.
This session explores what public institutions must do to respond to these evolving expectations. Beyond digital transformation, institutions need solutions that combine secure recording, trusted workflows, AI-assisted accessibility, and verifiable authenticity. The objective is not simply to make content available, but to create confidence that the information presented is complete, authentic, and has not been altered.
Finally, the session introduces Media Provenance as one of the key building blocks for restoring digital trust. By combining secure capture, authenticated processing, provenance metadata, and transparent verification mechanisms, public institutions can strengthen confidence in official audiovisual records while continuing to improve openness and accessibility. The presentation will illustrate how these principles can be integrated into modern digital media platforms through practical examples and successful public-sector deployments, and how they support the broader vision of trustworthy digital government.8
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C3. Access to information and knowledge
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C5. Building confidence and security in use of ICTs
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C7. ICT applications: benefits in all aspects of life — E-government
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C9. Media
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C10. Ethical dimensions of the Information Society
This session directly contributes to several WSIS Action Lines by addressing one of today's most pressing challenges for public institutions: maintaining trust in the digital age.
It supports C3 (Access to Information and Knowledge) by demonstrating how digital technologies can make parliamentary, judicial, and governmental proceedings more accessible through secure live streaming, on-demand access, multilingual AI services, and searchable audiovisual archives.
The session aligns with C5 (Building Confidence and Security in the Use of ICTs) by exploring how Media Provenance, authenticated workflows, and secure digital recording help protect the integrity and authenticity of official audiovisual records in an era of AI-generated and manipulated content.
It contributes to C7 (E-Government) by presenting practical approaches that enable governments and international institutions to modernize public communication while improving transparency, accountability, and citizen engagement.
The discussion also supports C9 (Media) by examining the evolving role of trusted digital media in public communication and democratic participation, and C10 (Ethical Dimensions of the Information Society) by addressing the ethical challenges created by synthetic media, AI, and the growing need for verifiable digital evidence.
Through practical examples and real-world deployments, the session demonstrates how trusted digital media ecosystems can strengthen transparency, reinforce public confidence, and support the broader objectives of the WSIS framework.
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Goal 9: Build resilient infrastructure, promote sustainable industrialization and foster innovation
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Goal 16: Promote just, peaceful and inclusive societies
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Goal 17: Revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development
This session explores how public institutions can strengthen trust, transparency and accountability in the digital age. As information becomes easier to create, distribute and manipulate, institutions face growing pressure to demonstrate the authenticity and integrity of the information they provide. By discussing trusted access to information, transparency, media provenance and public engagement, the session contributes particularly to SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions), while supporting innovation and digital infrastructure under SDG 9 and international collaboration under SDG 17.
- Objective 3: Foster an inclusive, open, safe and secure digital space that respects, protects and promotes human rights
- Objective 4: Advance responsible, equitable and interoperable data governance approaches
- Objective 5: Enhance international governance of artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity
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Relevant resources on Media Provenance, trusted information and public sector transparency