Provenance, not prominence

Governments across Europe are trying to solve a real problem with the wrong tool.

The UK's "Watch this Space" Green Paper proposes forcing social media platforms to give prominent placement to state-run broadcasters in feeds and search results. The EU's European Media Freedom Act pushes similar obligations. Both cite the same underlying shift: more than half of all news consumption now happens through social media, and trust in what people see there is eroding.

The proposed fix is prominence. Force algorithms to surface content from approved sources. The theory is straightforward: if people see regulated broadcasters first, they'll be less exposed to misinformation.

This treats discoverability as a proxy for trustworthiness. But those are different problems. Making something easy to find doesn't make it true. Making something hard to find doesn't make it false.

The actual problem

There is currently no way to verify whether a piece of video content is authentic just by looking at it. A deepfake and a real clip look identical in a feed. A manipulated video and an original export carry the same file format, the same metadata, the same thumbnail. Platforms have no signal to work with other than publisher identity, which is exactly why governments default to promoting the publishers they already trust.

But publisher identity is a blunt instrument. It assumes that every piece of content from an approved source is trustworthy and every piece from an unapproved source is suspect. The first claim is generous. The second punishes every independent creator and journalist who built an audience on these platforms by producing work that people actively sought out.

What provenance solves

Content provenance takes a different approach. Instead of asking "who published this?" it asks "can this content prove what it is?"

Every video exported from ByteWave is cryptographically signed on-device using ML-DSA-65, a post-quantum digital signature algorithm. The signature covers a hash of the actual video content and records that the file was produced by ByteWave without any server-side processing. Anyone with the public key can verify that a video hasn't been tampered with since export.

This isn't a concept unique to ByteWave. The C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) has been developing open standards for content credentials across the industry. What ByteWave adds is implementation at the consumer level: every free export, every user, every device. Provenance as a default, not a premium feature or an enterprise add-on.

Two models of trust

A prominence regime asks platforms to rank content by institutional authority. It requires governments to maintain lists of approved publishers, regulators to enforce algorithmic compliance, and platforms to override what their users chose to watch. It compresses reach for everyone not on the list. It concentrates power.

A provenance system lets content speak for itself. It requires nothing except cryptography. It doesn't care who published the content. It doesn't need a regulator to maintain a list. It scales to every creator with a phone.

The question Europe should be asking isn't "which publishers do we promote?" It's "how do we give every creator the tools to prove their content is real?"

That question has a technical answer. We're building it.

Also read: Your Feed Belongs to You · Best Free Video Editor Without a Watermark