What Is Verifiable Communication?

Long before there were screens to look at, people needed a way to know that an important message truly came from the source it lay claim to. A wax seal pressed into a letter, for example, told its recipient that the message had come from the person whose signet had made the impression, and that it had not been opened since. A monarch's signature, a notary's stamp, a guild's mark on a bale of cloth, or a bishop's ring pressed into an official decree: all of these were attempts to prove who was actually speaking, and whether the presented communication could be trusted.

What is easy to miss however, is how much these older tools depended on a kind of physical or institutional scarcity. A seal was hard to forge because the signet ring was a physical object, in a specific person's possession. A notarised document was hard to fake, because a notary staked their professional licence on it. Digital communication however, removes almost all of that scarcity. Words, once published, can be copied at near-zero cost, endlessly, perfectly, by anyone, and separated from whatever seal or letterhead accompanied the original the very moment someone crops a screenshot or retypes a sentence.

The tools inherited from an older world, largely visual, largely physical, were built for a time where copying was hard and impersonation left a trace. The world we currently inhabit is no longer so analog, and in this post, I want to argue that recovering what those older tools actually did, at a conceptual level, matters more now than ever, precisely because the physical scarcity that once made forgery hard, is gone.

Communication as an act, not merely as content

It is tempting to think of communication as though it were simply information in transit: words, figures, or images, that move from one place to another largely unchanged. This is, I think, a mistake, and philosophy of language has been saying so for some time. The founding insight of speech act theory is that language is not primarily a vehicle for describing facts, but a way of performing actions: a promise, a warning, a verdict, or even a declaration (Austin, 1962). What matters is the distinction between the mere uttering of words, and the social function that utterance performs, i.e. its force. A judge who says “I sentence you to five years” is not describing a state of affairs that is either true or false. The judge is announcing something, and the sentence has force only because the speaker occupies a position that entitles them to enforce it.

It may come as no surprise then, that public communication works the same way. When a public health authority issues a warning about contaminated water, or a listed company publishes its annual results, the significance of the message does not rest on the sentences alone, but on the relationship between the message and its source, on the illocutionary force that only a particular speaker, acting in a particular capacity, can supply. The health authority is exercising a mandate that the public has granted it for precisely this purpose. A company making a disclosure, carries legal weight because of who is making it, and under what regulatory obligation. Remove those relationships, and what remains is a form of words that merely resembles the genuine article without possessing its force.

In daily life we tend to read these modern equivalents of the seal almost without noticing: a recognisable domain, an official account with an established history of posting, a certificate of authority attached to a document or website, a blue checkmark on social media, or a familiar way of writing that a spokesperson or press office tends to use. All of these serve as signals that help us locate a message within its proper context: this is the party speaking, this is the capacity in which they speak, and this is communication we are entitled to treat as authoritative. None of these signals guarantees that an institution is right, or wise, or fair. What they offer instead is something more modest and no less important: a sense of where a given message stands in relation to the source it claims to represent.

What digital circulation does to that relationship

Digital media has proven remarkably efficient at moving content, but remarkably poor at preserving the relationship just described. A statement can now be lifted from its original setting within seconds of publication. It may be cropped into a screenshot, reposted without any link back to its source, translated into another language, paraphrased into a summary, folded into an unrelated thread, or reproduced by an artificial intelligence system responding to a question. At each of these steps, some portion of the original wording generally survives. What tends not to survive however, is the connection to the act that gave the wording its force; the knowledge of who actually issued it, when, and whether it remains accurate.

None of this need be malicious in every case however, a great deal of what happens online consists precisely of people sharing, quoting, and summarising material that originated elsewhere, and this is, on the whole, a healthy feature of public discourse. The main issue is that the further a message travels from the moment and place of its issuance, the harder it becomes to answer a handful of questions that, on reflection, matter a great deal: is this the wording that was originally used, or has it since been altered? Is it complete, or has something contextually important been omitted? Is it still current, or has it since been superseded? Did it genuinely originate with the organisation it claims to represent, or was the person who published it authorised to speak on that organisation's behalf?

What verification can and cannot establish

It is worth being precise here, because it would be easy to overstate what verification achieves; verification is not a mechanism for establishing truth in any general sense, and it does not settle the questions that matter most about a message's content. A verified record may confirm that a minister issued a particular statement without telling us anything about whether the policy it describes is sound. It may establish that a company published a specific claim without indicating whether that claim is complete, ethical, or presented fairly. It may fix, beyond dispute, the exact wording of an announcement, without determining how that announcement ought to be interpreted or acted upon. Questions of truth, judgement, and responsibility remain irreducibly human matters, as they always should, and no technical infrastructure changes that.

What verification can offer is narrower in scope, though no less significant for being so, and I think it is worth spelling out each part rather than treating “verification” as a single undifferentiated guarantee. For reference, each of the following concepts should be treated as a separate, confirmable fact about a piece of communication, rather than a single yes-or-no property.

• Origin: who actually issued it, as distinct from who appears to have issued it or who is widely assumed to have issued it.
• Authority: whether the issuing party was entitled to speak in that capacity, which is a separate question from origin, since a genuine employee of an organisation may still lack the authority to speak on its behalf.
• Timing: when it was issued and, just as importantly, whether it remains valid, since a true statement can become false or superseded without a single word of it changing.
• Integrity: whether the content in front of you now matches what was originally issued, unaltered by the copying, cropping, or paraphrasing it may have passed through since.

Together, these four properties protect an organisation's semantic capital: the accumulated stock of meaningful, well-formed content, ideas, records, and claims that an institution or a society depends upon to make sense of things (Floridi, 2018). Every statement it issues adds to that stock, but only for as long as its ‘illocutionary trace’ remains; the evidence that a statement's force really did come from the party entitled to it, recoverable independently of whoever happens to be relaying it.

As we have seen in a previous blog post, public communication is often distorted on purpose, with researchers grouping this broader threat under the term information disorder. One widely used framework developed for the Council of Europe, separates these actions into three categories that differ in both intent and severity (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017).

• Misinformation: false content shared without any intention to deceive, such as an outdated figure repeated in good faith.
• Disinformation: false content created and shared with the deliberate aim of causing harm, such as a fabricated quote or invented statistic.
• Malinformation: content that is factually accurate but is nonetheless deployed to cause harm, for instance by stripping it of context or releasing it at a moment designed to mislead.

What is interesting about this framework is that a perfectly accurate statement, quoted correctly, but stripped of its origin and its date, sits squarely in the malinformation category and can mislead just as effectively as an outright fabrication. It is this malinformation category, rather than the other two, that does most of the damage to an organisation's semantic capital, since nobody needs to lie for an alternative version of events to take hold. What malinformation exploits, in other words, is exactly the loss of the ‘illocutionary trace’.

A useful way of putting the point in context is that verifiable communication allows a message to carry evidence of its own history. This is not a complete account of every place the message has travelled or every interpretation it has since acquired, but enough of a trail, tied to origin, authority, timing, and integrity, that someone encountering it further downstream can still recover the essential points of reference: this is the version that was issued, this is who issued it, this is when it existed, and this is whether it has since changed. Crucially, that evidence should not depend on the trustworthiness of whichever platform happens to be relaying it: a platform's own verification signals, a badge, a checkmark, a policy on what counts as authentic, are set unilaterally by whoever owns and runs it, and what they mean can change entirely and without notice. Being able to point back to a fixed, independently verifiable version is therefore an important infrastructural capability that gives organisations something to stand on when their own narrative is contested.

A more precise vocabulary

Put together, these ideas help us move towards a working definition: Verifiable Communication is public communication whose origin, authority, timing and integrity can be independently confirmed after it has been issued, even when the wording has subsequently been copied, quoted or reproduced elsewhere.

As a concept, it provides a way of recovering the ‘illocutionary trace’, allowing someone who encounters a message further downstream to establish more than the fact that these words exist; that a particular organisation issued them, in a particular capacity, at a particular time, and in this particular form. This does not settle whether the communication is truthful, fair, or complete however. Instead, it preserves the evidential basis on which the provocative question can be asked; is this communication worthy of my trust? In that sense, verification gives public communication a retrievable memory of its own origin.

For institutions expected to speak with authority in digital public life, this capacity is becoming increasingly important. Once communication can be copied perfectly, imperceptibly altered, and redistributed without context, organisational credibility depends on whether the link between the message and the act of issuing it can still be recovered. This is the problem that Witnis was built to address.