Why does every C2PA provenance chain break the moment content hits social media?

C2PA cryptographic manifests are embedded in the file itself and survive storage and direct sharing, but every major social platform, including Instagram, X, LinkedIn, and TikTok, strips those manifests during upload transcoding and re-encoding as of 2026. The result is that a piece of content can be signed by a camera, a newsroom, and a regulatory-compliant AI generator, yet arrive in a feed with zero provenance information attached. The EU AI Act Article 50 and California SB 942 require machine-readable disclosure on AI-generated content, but metadata-only compliance dissolves at the exact distribution point where most people actually see content. No mechanism exists today to either force platforms to preserve manifests or to reconstruct provenance after stripping without a trusted third-party ledger that did not exist at capture time.