Watermarks and audit trails are not a solution to manipulated media. Face swapping does not care about provenance, it cares about reach.

Standards being put in-place now at the hardware level would have to become a filter at the display level unilaterally worldwide. There are always work arounds. Right now Yandex is providing the search results X is trying to stem.

How exactly does any of this go back into the bottle? It doesn’t. Reach is not just viral anymore it’s predatory, built on the scaffolding of ad-tech and social networks DAU’s OKRs, click bait, influencers and all the rest of the video horror show.

It’s almost like reach has become disintermediated from intent and original message and it becomes the content. The content that can achieve reach –– based on the current social-eco-political-pop-cutural landscape conditions.

This nightmare manifested itself with the Taylor Swift manipulations. Good on her fans to understand search is about results, and flooding that field with theirs. They also understood that the demand of ‘reach’ would be driving it right then.

Engagement needs to be removed as a metric that recommendation is based on. The content-reach-outrage troika knows no boundaries. It does not care about block chains, visible or invisible watermarks.