Satellite imagery has carried unusual evidentiary weight precisely because it was expensive and hard to fake. Google briefly removed that property, then reversed within 24 hours. The rollback is the useful part of the story: it is a rare, documented case of a platform discovering the failure mode before the failure, and it does not solve the underlying verification problem.
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Sometimes, but not reliably from inspection alone. Google states that images from its Google Earth feature carried SynthID watermarking and C2PA Content Credentials, checkable through the Gemini app or Lens in Search. Those are Google's claims about its own system and apply only to images from that source — a fabrication produced by a different model may carry no marker at all. The dependable approach is provenance rather than detection: trace the image to a named satellite operator and acquisition time, and cross-reference against independent imagery of the same location.
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