In Q3 2024 alone, Meta removed 1.1 billion fake accounts from its platforms. Read that number again. One point one billion. That’s more than the entire population of Africa — gone in a single quarter. And that’s just the accounts they caught.

Welcome to the bot epidemic.

The Scale of the Problem

Fake accounts aren’t a minor inconvenience. They’re a structural failure baked into the foundations of how the modern internet was built. Social platforms were designed to grow fast — and they did. But in that race to accumulate users, identity verification was never part of the conversation.

The result is a sprawling ecosystem of bots, fake profiles and anonymous bad actors that has quietly poisoned how information flows online.

Think about what that actually means in practice. 72% of online abuse comes from anonymous accounts. Fake profiles are routinely used to manufacture consensus, push misinformation and manipulate public opinion at scale. Advertisers are collectively spending billions targeting audiences that don’t exist. Journalists are sourcing quotes and eyewitness accounts from profiles that were never real people to begin with.

And the platforms know. They’ve always known. Fake engagement inflates their metrics. It props up ad revenue. It makes user numbers look impressive when earnings season rolls around.

Authenticity was never their priority. Engagement was.

AI Is About to Make This Exponentially Worse

If 1.1 billion fake accounts sounds alarming, what’s coming next is something else entirely.

Artificial intelligence can now produce convincing articles, realistic images, deepfake video and fully scripted social media conversations — quickly, cheaply and at enormous scale. We’re moving towards a world where synthetic content becomes the norm rather than the exception, and the line between what’s real and what’s generated quietly disappears.

Fake accounts used to need human operators behind them. Now a single bad actor can run thousands of AI-powered personas, each one producing original content, engaging with real users and nudging narratives — without a single real person involved.

The window to get ahead of this is open. But it won’t stay open indefinitely.

Why the Big Platforms Won’t Fix This

At this point it’s fair to ask — why don’t Facebook, X or Instagram just verify their users?

The answer is straightforward, even if it’s uncomfortable. It’s not in their interest.

Social platforms are built around engagement. Their entire commercial model depends on maximising time spent on platform, and bots — ironically — are quite good at driving engagement. Fake likes, inflated comment sections and algorithmic amplification all serve the same purpose underneath it all.

More engagement means more advertising revenue. Verification would shrink user numbers, complicate the metrics they sell to advertisers and threaten the model their valuations are built on.

The big platforms aren’t going to solve the trust crisis. In many ways, they are the trust crisis.

Verification Is the Only Real Answer

The solution itself isn’t complicated. It just requires someone to actually build it.

The underlying principle already exists in other critical systems. Banks verify customers before allowing transactions. Governments verify identity before issuing documents. Professional bodies check credentials before granting licences.

The same logic belongs in the information ecosystem. If every person publishing content online is a verified human being, and every piece of content carries authenticated provenance data, the bot epidemic loses most of its power overnight. Bad actors lose their anonymity. Fake communities can’t be assembled from nothing. Misinformation becomes traceable back to its source.

Verification doesn’t just reduce harm. It creates trust. And in an information economy, trust is the thing everything else is built on.

The Credibility Layer the Internet Has Been Missing

This is what Media.com is here to do.

We’re building a verified media network where every contributor is authenticated using banking-grade identity technology, and every piece of content carries provenance data through C2PA Content Credential standards. Not as a feature. Not as a compliance exercise. As the foundation.

The internet scaled information successfully. What it never built was a system for credibility.

The 1.1 billion fake accounts removed in a single quarter aren’t the conclusion of this story. They’re an early warning. The bot epidemic is growing, AI is accelerating it, and the platforms with the most to lose have every reason to look the other way.

Someone needs to build the trust infrastructure the world is asking for.

We think it should exist. And we’re building it.

Media.com is a verified media network dedicated to rebuilding trust online. Join the waitlist at media.com.

Must it be this way? Where did we go wrong? How do we fix it?

These are the questions we ask as we roll out Media.com, frame by frame, feature by feature. Our fundamental thrust being that ignorance of a given technological force causes trepidation and the sense that the force controls us. We’re here to provide a better way than social media has provided so far — not only to connect with each other, tell stories and keep informed, but also to quench the thirst so many of us have for reliability, accountability and transparency in the content we consume.

We consider this to be a glaring void the internet’s many pioneers overlooked in their great race to connect billions of nodes to each other – real or not, identifiable or anonymous – as they sought eyeballs or at least potential eyeballs, at almost any cost.

Perhaps initial generations of social media failed in this regard. Disorder was the rule. Connection was the pitch. Engagement was the measure. Advertising revenue was the bottom line. Comprehension came later.

We the innocent consumers saw the shiny new thing and hopped in. We drove and drove until the thing broke down, in the middle of nowhere, with ominous clouds approaching. And here we are: anxious. Unable to fix the thing because, yes, it turns out selfies and untraceable incendiary comments don’t fix much. We’ve gone a little cybersick in the process, within a media metaverse that lacks the coherence to calm itself down.

We aim to learn from and repair the era that brought us here. We seek to rediscover optimism about how the internet and social media might enhance, but not dictate, our personal and business lives. Doing so requires full comprehension and discussion of social media’s effects and mechanics.

Simple. Coherent. Authentic. Trustworthy. Mature. Anxiety-free.

These are some of our guideposts. This is where a new way to think about “social media all grown up” begins — with intention.

Certainly a more mindful internet is possible, following in the tradition of a medium built to find improvements from within, as media and tech build atop each other, new version after new version. That’s our position — for the record. We can do this.

The first challenge: verification

Generations raised on smartphones and online networks seem to grasp these pitfalls more candidly than most. Internet ethnographer Katherine Dee describes the current era as shaped by “an internet-native sadism” where depression, nihilism and sleeping with one’s phone is a common experience for many under 40.

Indeed, millions now bear battle scars from a system that was perhaps never built to manage the forces of online exploitation. We often blame smartphones, but a smartphone is just hardware — a portal to the internet, wired by media in all its forms. We’re addicted to the content, not the device. A television is only as powerful as the shows and content it broadcasts; otherwise, it’s just an inert plastic box. A phone is the same.

In developing our vision for a next-generation social media platform, we prioritized verified identity. We examined how open systems can be exploited and concluded that anonymity — and the bots that feed on it — had to go.

We also implemented an age threshold (18) and built trust and safety into the foundation of our platform. Our Trust Center is at the core of this effort, ensuring oversight on issues such as: dangerous organizations, adult sexual abuse, hate speech, misinformation, copyright laws and high-risk users. See our Trust Center for more details.

Verification is our first step toward a trusted online universe. Many online seem to think anonymity is a fundamental reason to be online; we don’t question that this is attractive. Anonymity has its place, especially for those caught in oppressive societies and situations. But that’s not us. We are the first major social media community to validate each and every user. We understand the need for a safe anonymous space for some, but the other guys have that covered.

For individuals, a valid government-issued photo ID (a passport or driver’s license) is required. For a business profile, we verify an authorized officer before pursuing additional documentation under “Know Your Customer” and “Know Your Business” standards.

This means every piece of content on Media.com has a traceable source. We believe candid conversations and provocative content can coexist with this model. We believe internet commerce and social engagement online function better when humans — not bots — are in control. And we insist that a town square isn’t a town square if it’s full of cardboard cutouts with fake names pretending to be human. After all, isn’t that what computer games are for?

This is real social media, built on trust, safety, opportunity and imagination. A space where fragmented apps, paranoia about online interactions, and distrust dissolve into a sustainable joie de internet — a love of the internet. Yes, we believe it’s possible.

A higher-quality engagement

Susannah Page-Katz, our lead on content moderation, previously served as director of trust and safety at Kickstarter, where she drafted its AI guardrail policy. Crucially, this policy didn’t take a black-and-white stance on AI content creation; instead, it acknowledged AI as a media tool while ensuring creators remained transparent about its use.

The idea was to exercise control over a whiz-bang technology, while implementing a flexible approach that respects a creator’s inherent freedom to create as well as protect work from those that would steal or plagiarize. To control bot software, not bow to its supremacy. The internet is full of short cuts, safe to say — to fame, knowledge, art, journalism, wealth, etc. Page-Katz has been working on many forthcoming tools that address fact-checking and identity.

The trend is moving in this direction. A 2023 YouGov survey of 1,000 adults, cited by Bloomberg Law, found that 62% of respondents believe platforms should require real names and identity verification. Europe leads with tough policies Media.com follows, and several American states have enacted laws to “prohibit impersonation for purposes of harassment, intimidation, threat or deception to facilitate contact.”

Freedom of speech being a respected pillar within our approach, within reason. Does an anonymous burner-bot have the right to say whatever it wants? Not really. Not in our space. We’d have to point out that such entities don’t really “speak” at all. They mimic speech; they fake it. And that is not a protected right, last time we checked.

“These laws aren’t an attempt to limit what anyone can say,” wrote Bruce Heiman, a partner at the law firm K&L Gates, for Bloomberg. “They aim to prevent false identification.”

Page-Katz echoed Heiman. “We’re verifying the individuals behind the account, not the information they might share,” she said. “That’s the safety piece.”

Christy Grace Provines, our global head of brand, encourages new visitors to explore the Trust Center to gain a comprehensive understanding of our approach. Having led high-profile campaigns like Tinder’s 2023 global rebrand, Provines emphasizes that every feature we introduce is designed to “do less harm” and “be less toxic.”

“Our Trust Center outlines our reason to exist,” she said. “And verification matters because there are no bots on the platform. That’s our aim.”

We’re building a platform where engagement is higher quality, with fewer trolls, less spam and reduced toxicity. Hate speech, doxing and threats will trigger oversight. The goal is to create a digital space where accountability, trust and meaningful interactions thrive.

Bit by bit, we’re on a mission to redefine social media. We’ve identified the void and have set about filling it. We’ve established a safe online space and we invite you to be a part of it. We hope you’ll join us for our mission.

But who actually saw it?

For a significant chunk of digital advertising spend, the honest answer is: nobody. Because nobody was there.

The Fake Audience Problem Is Bigger Than Most Advertisers Realize

The scale of fraudulent activity in digital advertising has been an open secret in the industry for years. Bots click on ads. Fake accounts inflate engagement metrics. Sophisticated fraud networks generate convincing-looking traffic from audiences that exist only as lines of code.

Estimates vary depending on the methodology, but independent research has consistently suggested that a meaningful percentage of all digital ad traffic is non-human. Some analyses put the figure considerably higher for certain platforms and formats. The money lost to ad fraud globally runs into the tens of billions every year.

What makes this particularly awkward is that the platforms selling the advertising inventory have historically had very little commercial incentive to clean it up. Fake impressions still generate real revenue. Inflated engagement figures make their platforms look more attractive to buyers. The fraud often sits several layers removed from where the transaction happens, making it easy to attribute poor campaign performance to creative or targeting rather than the integrity of the audience itself.

Marketers have largely absorbed this as a cost of doing business. They probably shouldn’t.

What Brand Safety Actually Costs

Fake audiences aren’t the only problem. Unverified platforms create brand safety risks that go well beyond wasted impressions.

When anyone can create an account under any identity and publish any content, advertisers have no reliable way of knowing what their ads will appear alongside. Brand safety tools have improved, but they remain reactive by nature — they identify problematic content after it already exists, and the category lists they operate from are always chasing the problem rather than getting ahead of it.

The reputational cost of appearing alongside harmful content isn’t theoretical. There have been enough high-profile examples of major brands pulling spend from platforms after their advertising appeared next to extremist content, graphic material or coordinated disinformation campaigns to make this a boardroom-level concern.

The underlying issue in every case is the same. Unverified platforms create unverified environments. And unverified environments are, by definition, unpredictable.

The Verification Advantage for Advertisers

The proposition for advertisers on a verified platform is fundamentally different.

When every user has been authenticated as a real person against official records, the audience data actually means something. A million verified users is a million real human beings — with genuine interests, authentic behaviour patterns and actual purchasing intent. Not a million accounts, some unknown proportion of which are bots, duplicates or inactive profiles being counted to inflate a number.

For performance advertisers, that means metrics that reflect reality. Click-through rates, engagement figures and conversion data drawn from verified human behaviour are genuinely useful signals. The same numbers on an unverified platform could mean almost anything.

For brand advertisers, it means something arguably more valuable — an environment with built-in accountability. When content is tied to verified identity, the nature of what gets published changes. Users are accountable for what they say and share. The kind of content that creates brand safety nightmares on anonymous platforms becomes considerably harder to produce when anonymity isn’t an option.

The Premium Audience Shift Is Already Happening

There’s a broader shift taking place in digital advertising that the industry hasn’t fully reckoned with yet.

As AI-generated content becomes ubiquitous and the distinction between real and synthetic audiences becomes increasingly difficult to establish on traditional platforms, the value of verified human attention is going to increase significantly. Advertisers who are already thinking carefully about audience quality — rather than just audience volume — are ahead of where the whole industry is heading.

Premium publishers have always commanded premium rates because they offered something the open web couldn’t: a known, engaged, quality audience in a controlled editorial environment. The verification layer applies that same logic at network scale.

Reaching a verified human being who is genuinely engaged with credible content is worth more than reaching an unverifiable account on a platform optimized for maximum engagement regardless of quality. That gap in value is only going to widen.

What Advertising on a Verified Network Looks Like

Media.com is building the advertising environment that the industry has been theoretically asking for without anywhere to point to.

Every profile on the platform is verified against official records. Every contributor is a real, authenticated person or organization. The audience that brands access through Media.com is, by definition, human – because the infrastructure makes anything else impossible.

For advertisers, that means genuine reach, trustworthy metrics and an editorial environment built from the ground up with accountability at its core. No bots inflating your impression count. No fake engagement distorting your performance data. No anonymous content creating brand safety exposure you didn’t sign up for.

The billions being wasted on audiences that don’t exist isn’t an inevitability. It’s a consequence of building advertising infrastructure on top of unverified platforms, and assuming that problem belongs to someone else to fix.

It doesn’t have to work that way.

Media.com is a verified media network dedicated to rebuilding trust online.

A line from Albert Einstein might seem a bit “out there” when discussing why James Mawhinney, the Australian founder of Media.com, started a social media company. But then, solving problems from a fresh angle even as the problems in question grow new fangs before our eyes… that’s precisely what he’s doing.

Mawhinney wants to clean up social media while letting it evolve. He’s managing a global team focused on building a first-ever fully verified online community. Dreams of “tech with a conscience” are not only present, they’re verifiable. Simple, right?

It’s what Larry Weber, a veteran tech-media expert, calls “evolutionary, not revolutionary tech” that builds on the notion that authentication has become far more attractive to social media users as humanity and technology converge. Weber cited the iPhone as an innovation in design not computing that nevertheless altered how we live and interact with the internet. Crucially, the iPhone was a synthesis. It was (and is) three things in one.

“He didn’t invent the computer, he didn’t invent the camera and he didn’t invent the telephone, but he invented the iPhone,” said Weber, of Apple founder Steve Jobs. “When you understand technology is evolutionary, not revolutionary, it all builds on itself.”

Echoing Weber, Mawhinney envisions a social-media synthesis that builds on the first decades and drains them of their toxicity. He hopes for more honesty in how we interact online through verified traffic and sourced content. He likes to reference the internet’s promise of soaring connectivity, but he’s not cynical about why its networks have failed in many ways.

“The holes in social media are now becoming quite clear and stark,” he said in an interview from Melbourne. “We aim to fill those holes.”

Mawhinney sees connectivity and content as foundational in social media but believes a third dimension—verification—is largely untapped. And while his eyes are open about social media’s pitfalls, Mawhinney is also sympathetic when talking about why news companies, for instance, might take shortcuts in an online environment where clicks and engagement matter more than substance. And he knows why incumbent social media giants tend to skirt accountability for bad information or the presence of bots, fake profiles and burner accounts. (Spoiler: it’s about the advertising; inflating impressions and audience size for ad dollars.)

If any entity deserves blame for social media gone wrong, it’s the underlying business model, he said. Engagement and large user numbers matter when the primary metric is advertising revenue. Both legacy press on one end of the media spectrum and social media pioneers like Meta or X (previously Twitter) on the other are ruled by this pull. Mawhinney hopes for another way – and he’s willing to experiment to attain the best approach.

“Their business models are driven by ad revenues and impressions and less so by authentic engagements,” he said. “We want to bring the focus back to real users and a real media experience.”

Mawhinney’s vision is for a safe platform that fosters genuine connections and information integrity — to enhance human lives and commerce — as he guides his company with an ethical compass. That’s the value proposition.

A businessman with a heart? Mawhinney downplays such characterizations. It’s more practical than that. He saw a wide-ranging problem and set out to fix it.

Mawhinney decided to start Media.com about four years ago when he realized everyday interactions (both online and off) could be verified using existing technology. Like many of us, he experienced several negative social media-driven events that led him to examine the value of “solving the distrust in communicating with people you don’t know.”

Mawhinney faced his own reputational turmoil in Australia; he’s been embroiled in a personal legal controversy that’s consumed his time, money and will. He’s worked hard to clear his name from a misunderstanding inflamed by social media and hopes to be clear of his difficulties by the end of the year, to turn his attention full-time to helping others avoid his plight.

“This is something that’s touched me very personally,” he said, of targeted misinformation and how quickly it can spread online. “I’ve seen how rapidly harm can be caused at a very substantial scale. I take what we’re doing very seriously.”

He described his experience as “torment” when some bad actors hiding behind fake profiles attacked him online. “I thought, ‘I bet these people would not do this if their name was public,’” he said. “That was the catalyst for my pivot to start Media.com.

“This is far from an Einstein theory. It’s just common sense,” he added. “We have all been swept up in the excitement of connectivity and content… and have missed what I think is the most crucial aspect of any mature network: verification of its members, so the interactions are real.”

Real people, real posts, real connections. No bots. Access means a community member is not the hush-hush product, as users and their data tend to be on almost any other social-media or search-engine site. Verified traffic is the path social networks and search engines are “moving towards,” Mawhinney said, because they feel the pressure of discontent. The established apps are nervous to completely do so because it could reduce traffic and hurt ad sales, so they tend to perpetuate half measures and double-speak. What results is a negative frame for social media that is apparent in politics, with nations increasingly looking to regulate harmful content, as well as in daily online life, where news about mental-health hazards tends to dominate coverage of social media’s impact.

Importantly, no major social media platform requires all users the ability to verify one’s identity. Instead, they verify for individuals and entities who are either high-profile users and companies (Snapchat) or paid subscribers (Meta Verified for Facebook and Instagram, and new Twitter Blue for X).

Mawhinney points to Reddit as an application where daily anonymous engagement is enormously important, and that works for Reddit, but he sees room on the other end – where verified profiles bring accountability and therefore deliver more certainty and quality. A cloud cover of trust might not work for Reddit, Instagram or TikTok, but it is the backbone of Media.com. The company’s Trust Centre is the mission statement.

Mawhinney didn’t start Media.com from a dorm room or outer space. He’s not a venture capitalist looking to reorder society with artificial intelligence or involvement in high-level geopolitics. What’s most striking about Mawhinney is how grounded he is. He’s focused, literal and clear.

“The internet is not broken, but how we interact with it can easily be improved,” he said. “An internet where we can get to know each other is very possible. What we’re doing is effectively introducing verification of each node. These technologies exist. We’re insulating the problems we all know about with a layer of trust over the top of the internet.

“Social networks don’t know who their users are; they know who their advertisers are,” he added, likening Media.com’s approach to that of the banking industry, which has to know its customers’ identities to stop money laundering and other illicit activities. Think of it as an attempt to stop or at least curtail information laundering, along with identity, data and anxiety laundering.

Doing so doesn’t have to compromise freedom of speech, in Mawhinney’s view. That’s why Media.com’s verification tools will soon be followed by a fact-checking system that resembles the structure Meta recently abandoned. Mawhinney thinks content safeguards can coexist with free speech, as verification tends to “urge users to think harder before posting to ensure the content’s origin is trustworthy.”

“The best solution is you just have to be more careful about what you write,” he said, “but that’s not good enough. There has to be a technology solution which introduces accountability and transparency to what gets published online.”

While user verification enhances trust, it doesn’t guarantee accuracy or eliminate harm. That’s why content moderation is crucial. In 2025, Media.com will roll out a “three-check” flagging system that includes: proactive detection of harmful, offensive or inaccurate content; third-party fact-checking of certain stories; and user/community flags as a last line of defense.

“I don’t anticipate being able to provide the perfect environment,” Mawhinney admits, as “policing every piece of content is just not a sustainable business model.” Still, if Media.com is able to enhance a large portion of content published online with the stamp of authenticity, while establishing itself as a one-stop media warehouse for business and individuals, it will have found its niche and advanced the cause of conscious, caring tech.

Mawhinney adds that he respects early-stage entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg because he effectively invented social media and made Meta into “one of the world’s most valuable companies, with an enormous number of shareholders.” But he does not agree with the decision to abandon fact-checking.

“My admiration comes from the perspective that he’s managed to straddle this horse,” he said, referring to how he’s handled scrutiny of his own reputation while remaining focused on his company’s long-term prospects. “He is a pioneer in this space.”

Mawhinney adds that he has no plans to divest in the future and hopes for “a safe place where a person can speak their truth uninterrupted.” He has faith in the process he started and wants Media.com to get its foundation right this year before going live with full functionality.

Weber, for one, is excited about the approach. He sees Media.com’s mission as “the veracity of information, which I think is the job of all of us, but it’s going to take innovators like a Media.com to really pull this off and be a leader in the category, because the big guys aren’t doing it right now.

“I’m going to be a cheerleader for companies like Media.com and hope they can win this for all of us because we’re only going to be a better society if we’re told the truth and we use the truth in our decision-making,” Weber said.

Outside of work? Mawhinney says his passion is business. “It doesn’t feel like work to me, especially when there’s purpose behind it.” But he soon hopes to spend more time afloat with his partner and five-year-old daughter, as he did growing up around boats most of his younger life in Perth, Western Australia.

“Growing up around boats helps provide a different perspective on life,” he said. “It teaches responsibility, safety, being at one with the elements and provides a sense of freedom. This can be a helpful counterbalance to a very busy lifestyle.”

A very busy lifestyle Mawhinney hopes will translate as Media.com looks to roll out globally within the next year. He’s hoping that “pressure creates diamonds.”

“The words ‘verified community’ prick up a lot of ears in a positive sense,” he said. “I’m feeling confident we’re in a good spot.”

James Mawhinney, founder and CEO of Media.com, began his career in digital marketing at the age of just 17.

After travelling to the United States to learn digital marketing, he returned to Perth and co‑founded one of Australia’s first such firms alongside his father.

He later studied law and investment finance and established a personal investment group. A regulatory investigation in 2020 triggered litigation that “thankfully is getting close to concluding.”

From that experience arose his conviction that the digital world lacked a trusted, transparent space for real people – a conviction that became the foundation for Media.com.

“I experienced firsthand the harm that can be caused by anonymous profiles and fake profiles,” said James Mawhinney, Founder & CEO, Media.com.

Verified Identity

Mawhinney draws a comparison between financial systems and social media: just as banks require identity verification to protect money, social networks should require it to protect information.

“When we publish content online, we’re publishing a form of currency,” he said. “Others are consuming it or they’re using it … being transmitted to others.” Without verification, “that content’s coming from unverified and therefore untraceable sources.”

On Media.com, every user – whether individual or business – undergoes identity verification using the same Know Your Customer (KYC) and Know Your Business (KYB) procedures used by banks. The checks typically take 90 seconds to two minutes and cover over 200 countries.

With verified identities, users are more likely to “think twice about what you’re going to say,” leading to “a far more … not just safer environment, but more enjoyable environment.”

Online Harms

Mawhinney argues that many of the problems plaguing current social networks stem from anonymity – trolling, cyberbullying, misinformation, disinformation and untraceable interactions.

He recounted his own experience of having a fake account created in his name, posting harmful content, and escaping accountability because no one knew who the perpetrator really was. On Media.com, where identity is confirmed, there is “someone to hold accountable.”

As a result, the platform could reduce the incidence of harmful behaviour, promote responsible posting, and create a community grounded in real identities.

Growth Path

Development of Media.com began in early 2023. The company has built a waiting list of users from more than 130 countries – including unexpected registrations from remote regions such as Antarctica.

The desktop version of the network is already operational. In the coming weeks, Media.com will submit its mobile application to app stores. Mawhinney expects a strong uptake early next year: the platform will support a familiar social‑media experience, including a feed, long‑form and short‑form content, and – by first quarter next year – a video‑shorts feature.

The key difference, he says, is identity verification.

Users will know “you can trust at least the identity of the people that you’re engaging with.” In an era increasingly concerned with AI‑generated content, this clarity will make it easier to distinguish between human and machine outputs.

Regulatory Signals

Mawhinney believes Media.com’s verification-first model could guide future regulation.

He points to legislation such as the European Union’s Online Safety Act, which introduced optional profile verification. Over time, he expects that social networks may be required to know who their users are, much like banks must know their account holders.

In that envisioned future, platforms built with verification from the start – like Media.com – would be better positioned to comply.

“As of 24 hours ago, Australia’s implemented the under‑16 social media ban,” said Mawhinney. “We believe that what we’re building is a next‑generation network where having every profile verified since inception is going to solve a lot of the online harms associated with misinformation, disinformation, trolling.”

Before journalists could verify the facts, before editors could weigh the sourcing, before any traditional gatekeeping process could kick in — the story was already everywhere. Shared, reshared, screenshot, reposted. By the time corrections emerged, most people had already moved on.

This is the information environment we’re living in. And for journalists, it presents a problem that’s getting harder to ignore.

Trust in Media Is Collapsing — And the Numbers Show It

Audiences aren’t just sceptical of individual stories anymore. They’re sceptical of entire institutions. Trust in mainstream media has been declining steadily for years across most Western democracies, and the rise of social media hasn’t helped — if anything it’s accelerated the erosion by flooding the information space with content that carries no accountability whatsoever.

The irony is that more information is available now than at any other point in human history. The problem was never access. It was always credibility.

When anyone can publish anything under any name, and when the platforms distributing that content have no meaningful interest in verifying whether it’s true or who wrote it, the entire ecosystem tilts towards noise. Readers feel it. Journalists feel it. And the knock-on effects for public decision making — in elections, in health crises, in financial markets — are becoming harder to dismiss.

AI Has Changed the Stakes Completely

For most of the internet’s history, misinformation was largely a human problem. Someone chose to write something false. Someone chose to share it. The solution, in theory, was human too — better media literacy, stronger editorial standards, more responsible platform policies.

AI has quietly made that framing obsolete.

Synthetic articles, generated images, deepfake video, fabricated quotes attributed to real public figures — all of it can now be produced in seconds at virtually no cost. The technical barrier between wanting to create disinformation and actually doing it has effectively disappeared.

What this means for journalists is significant. The sourcing challenge that already existed — how do you verify an eyewitness account from someone you’ve never met? — has become considerably more complex when that eyewitness account might have been generated entirely by a machine.

The old tools aren’t sufficient anymore. Something structural needs to change.

The Missing Piece Is Provenance

When a photograph is taken on a modern camera, metadata is embedded into the file — the time, the location, the device used. That information doesn’t make the image impossible to manipulate, but it creates an evidence trail. It introduces accountability into a process that would otherwise have none.

Content provenance works on the same principle, applied to everything published online.

The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity — known as C2PA — has developed an open standard that allows a digital credential to be embedded into any piece of content at the point of creation. That credential travels with the content wherever it goes, recording who created it, when, and on what platform. It doesn’t tell you whether something is true. But it tells you where it came from, and it makes that origin verifiable.

For journalists, this is significant. Imagine being able to look at a video surfacing on social media and immediately see that it was captured by a verified individual in a specific location at a specific time — rather than having to spend hours trying to establish whether the source is legitimate.

That’s not a distant hypothetical. That’s what content provenance infrastructure makes possible.

Why This Matters Beyond the Newsroom

It would be easy to frame this as a problem that belongs exclusively to professional media. It isn’t.

The collapse of trust in information affects everyone. It shapes how people vote, what health decisions they make, whether they trust institutions, how they understand the world around them. When the information environment is polluted, the effects ripple outward into every corner of society.

Rebuilding that trust isn’t just a technical challenge — though the technical infrastructure matters enormously. It’s a cultural one too. People need to feel that when they read something, there’s a real human being accountable for it. That the content hasn’t been fabricated or manipulated. That the source is who they say they are.

Verification creates that foundation. Without it, credibility will keep eroding regardless of how good the journalism is.

What a Verified Information Ecosystem Actually Looks Like

Media.com is building the infrastructure that makes this possible.

Every contributor on the platform is verified as a real person or authenticated organisation using banking-grade identity technology. Every piece of content published carries C2PA Content Credentials — provenance data embedded at the point of creation that travels with the content wherever it’s distributed.

The result is a media network where trusted content can be created, published and shared with a level of accountability that simply doesn’t exist anywhere else online right now. For journalists, it means a trusted pool of verified sources. For audiences, it means content they can actually interrogate. For the broader information ecosystem, it means a foundation that credibility can be rebuilt on.

The internet worked out how to scale information a long time ago. What it never built was a system to scale trust alongside it.

That’s what we’re here to change.

Media.com is a verified media network dedicated to rebuilding trust online.