Suspilne is introducing a beta version of C2PA — an open international standard for verifying the origin and edit history of digital content. This will help users of the suspilne.media web platform to better understand where images and videos come from.

For Suspilne, implementing C2PA is another step toward strengthening audience trust. Users only need to open the “cr” mark to see information about the content’s origin.

“Credibility is a fundamental value of Suspilne’s news, and we are strengthening it through innovation. Behind the ‘cr’ mark is a full-fledged trust infrastructure integrated into Suspilne’s production processes,” said Mykola Chernotytskyi, Head of Managing Board of Suspilne.

The C2PA standard is especially relevant at a time when artificial intelligence can quickly generate realistic images, and manipulative content is used for disinformation during the war.

“Now Suspilne’s original content — news, sports, cultural and educational, children’s, and archival content — can be quickly distinguished from synthetic content. For Suspilne, this is about responsible relations with the audience and protecting the daily work of production teams,” said Viktoriia Murovana, General Producer of Suspilne’s Audiovisual Content Directorate.

The technology is being introduced in stages, starting as a beta feature for photos with editorial testing, and later expanding to audio and video. Meanwhile, the digital products team is working to ensure content provenance data is clear and becomes a familiar part of the user experience.

“Suspilne is focused on building a new generation of user experience in interacting with digital products. Our task is to make content provenance signals clear and familiar elements of every news story for millions of users,” said Kyrylo Iesin, Head of Suspilne’s Digital Products Development Team.

To make a complex technology work for the audience in a simple and seamless way, it was integrated into internal editorial and technical processes.

“My task as a developer was to make a complex technology useful for the audience. Users should not have to understand cryptography to know whether an image can be trusted. Transparent algorithms under editorial supervision will do this work for them,” said Kyrylo Taran, a software developer on Suspilne’s Digital Products Development Team.

The project was implemented with grant support from BBC Media Action. The partners funded the purchase of two professional photo cameras with C2PA support and subscriptions to digital services for secure transfer and processing of photographs. This creates a chain of trust from shooting to publication, as the origin of an image is recorded at creation and preserved throughout the editorial cycle.

“Suspilne implemented this technology project—the first of its kind in Eastern Europe—to protect original content from deepfakes, at the initiative and with the support of BBC R&D. For public media, C2PA serves both as an effective tool for countering disinformation and as a demonstration of transparency, which helps build audience trust. The implementation of the C2PA standard also directly supports compliance with the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act, which requires machine-readable labeling of AI-generated content. “This makes it an important and timely step for news organizations operating in the European market or targeting a European audience,” said Olga Sedova, Director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia at BBC Media Action.

Engineering support was provided by Tim Murphy, a community mentor for the Content Authenticity Initiative and co-founder of the Pixelstream platform, which also verifies signed content. Tim became interested in this field while observing coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when newsrooms manually verified the authenticity of videos from journalists and witnesses.

“The work of the Suspilne team from initial concept to passing C2PA conformance has been deeply inspiring to witness. I am grateful to have been a part of the project, and I look forward to seeing stories published with Content Credentials.” commented Tim Murphy.

SSL.com acted as the technology partner, providing Suspilne Ukraine with C2PA and CAWG certificates free of charge. C2PA signs data about the origin and changes of content, while CAWG — the Creator Assertions Working Group — identifies the signing organization, confirming that the content was published by Suspilne. In February 2026, SSL.com became the first publicly trusted certificate authority to issue production C2PA certificates.