Reality Needs Receipts.

A few weeks ago, I was thumbing through TikTok’s content slot machine and came across a video of foster dogs walking through a seated circle of humans, affectionately sniffing and choosing the person they would call home. A potent magnet for my emotions. I sent it to a few friends, marveling at the ingenuity of letting dogs pick their forever family. There was impossible joy packed into this 15-second clip.

I was so thirsty for another dopamine hit that I surrendered myself to the algorithm and watched half a dozen other videos of facilities adopting this practice. Until I saw a Silken Windhound suddenly get on its hind legs, saunter down an aisle and start giving a man an unsolicited lap dance. My forehead drooped in shame. With the highest degree of digital literacy, I was nearly moved to tears by AI slop videos that I was in turn sending out to my circle of fellow animal lovers. Impossible joy indeed.

The rise of deep fakes, generative videos, and synthetic media has rapidly outpaced our ability to discern what’s real from what’s fabricated. This is an under-appreciated epistemic breakdown. We can’t trust our own eyes anymore. Even the head of experience at Instagram has started outwardly encouraging users to approach images and video with skepticism because authenticity can no longer be assumed.

Reality itself is being commoditized and corrupted faster than platforms can protect it.

It feels like we’re headed towards a media landscape where people will care less about whether or not something is “real” and more about how the content makes them feel. Sometimes that’s ok and sometimes it’s not so great.

TikTok has begun labeling AI-generated content and embracing metadata standards, like Content Credentials from the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), to give users context about how and when media was created. This idea is a couple of years old and feels promising — metadata that can’t be stripped would give viewers a digital nutrition label, revealing origin, editing history, and whether AI was involved.  But even content tagged with tamper-proof metadata rarely stays tagged once it travels off the originating platform.  And if someone screenshots a video and re-uploads it, the tag breaks entirely.  Reality itself is being commoditized and corrupted faster than platforms can protect it.

This moment demands digital literacy at a level most people simply aren’t capable of. But literacy alone won’t solve a trust problem baked into the architecture of the internet. What we need is attribution you can’t wrest away… a public, unforgeable record of provenance that travels with the media itself rather than vanishing when it crosses platform boundaries.

For those of you turned off by crypto because of abstract utility, unregulated corruption and the proliferation of  monkeys JPEGs, allow me to introduce one of the great use cases for blockchain technology. Immutability, public verification, tamper-resistant records that can provide a relative foundation for truth: a timestamped, auditable lineage for every piece of digital media that can be verified independently of any single platform on a trustless ledger.

Here’s how it works in practice: images and videos are fingerprinted at the moment of creation — on the device itself — and that fingerprint is stored on a public ledger. When the same media surfaces elsewhere, the fingerprint can be checked against the ledger regardless of where the content now lives. Researchers are already proposing blockchain-anchored registries that use perceptual hashing, allowing verification to survive even  benign transformations or edits.  This wouldn’t be a panacea, but it would be a trust anchor that exists closer to ground truth in an ecosystem otherwise defined by increased uncertainty.

So how do we build systems that make discernment feasible at scale?

The answer requires device manufacturers, platforms and regulators to align around open provenance standards as foundational infrastructure.

Truth cannot live in the court of public opinion alone because popularity and authenticity are now decoupled. Truth needs a ledger… a provenance system built on verifiable rails that doesn’t change when a video crosses into a different walled garden. Without that, we risk a digital future where the most visceral, emotionally resonant content gets algorithmically privileged, not for its fidelity, but for its virality.

We need to move beyond trusting what we see online toward verifying what we see online.

We talk often at Brand Knew about clarity of narrative. And about how audiences perceive stories and how transparency accelerates trust. This is the same challenge writ large across the information systems that shape culture, politics, and prevailing collective memory. We need to move beyond trusting what we see online toward verifying what we see online. Blockchain and trustless attribution won’t fix everything, but can provide an architecture of truth in a medium where the synthetic increasingly masquerades as reality.

We are already living in an age where seeing is no longer believing and emotional resonance isn’t proof of truth. It’s time to invest in systems that make truth discernible again, not as a matter of innovation, but as a matter of necessity.

Zach Suchin, CEO