How to spot fake content on social media
<https://www.rte.ie/author/1090321-ruth-kennedy/> By Ruth Kennedy
RTÉ Radio One
Storyful editor Rhona Tarrant talks to Ryan Tubridy about spotting fake
video on social media about the conflict in Ukraine, the dangers of
spreading misinformation and how Silicon Valley is fighting Russian
disinformation.
People used to call social media a minefield; now it's a war zone. Platforms
are flooded with content relating to the conflict in Ukraine. Misinformation
could cause real harm; but how do we know what we are sharing is real?
Saving the truth from becoming a casualty of war is the job of New
York-based editor Rhona Tarrant and her colleagues at the verification
agency Storyful. Rhona chatted to Ryan Tubridy about the different kinds of
fake content on social media and how to spot them. She also talked about how
the big tech companies in the US are reacting to the spread of
misinformation about the conflict in Ukraine.
Of all the conflicts she has covered as a journalist, Rhona Tarrant says
that people online are most engaged with the unfolding story in Ukraine. She
says the desire to share dramatic images and videos can lead people to
amplify content that is not real, or not what it says it is.
Rhona says that fake content can be created deliberately or accidentally and
both of them are bad:
"Number one is disinformation. That is false information that the person who
is putting it out knows is false. That would be for example, Russian
disinformation about 'false flag' attacks in Ukraine."
Misinformation also spreads by mistake and it, too can cause havoc. Once
Its shared, Rhona says, the harm is done:
"The other one is misinformation. And thats the regular person who sees a
video on TikTok of Ukrainian soldiers saying goodbye to their families and
they think, 'thats terrible I'm going to share that on my own page."
The problem is caused by people taking the video out of its original
context, be it deliberately or by accident. The original footage could have
come from old newsreels, movies or even video games, Rhona says:
"Its actually videos that have been taken out of context, so, were seeing
that quite a lot in Ukraine. Theres a ton of videos of old training
exercises that people are saying are taking place in Ukraine; you know, old
video games were seeing that are being shared as claiming to show rocket
strikes on Kiev."
Ryan was dumbfounded at the thought of people sharing clips from movies or
video games as if they were genuine war footage. Rhona cited a recent
example that shed come across in her work verifying online video:
"Theres this one going viral at the moment and it has been for the last
week and its from a 2018 movie and it shows these soldiers saying goodbye
to their wives. Now, its actually taken from a movie, but it looks like it
could possibly be news footage."
Rhona says people share in good faith, but they do it so quickly that they
dont pay attention to the source of the video. Some people spot fakes and
leave a comment under the post to warn other users, but that can go
unnoticed in the rush to share. Another example Rhona gives is a clip from a
video game that went viral as if it were "real":
"There was this so-called Ghost of Kiev shooting down a Russian fighter
jet and it actually turned out to be a combat simulator video game. We see
this all the time."
Rhona explains the paradox that the worse the quality, the more convinced
people are that its real:
"A lot of the time they are actually poor quality, so people are like,
well, its just poor quality, thats why it looks like that, but a lot of
the time they are actually taken from other scenarios, situations or they
are not even real."
People are familiar with the concept of "
<https://www.rte.ie/lifestyle/living/2021/0809/1239805-what-are-deepfakes-an
d-how-are-they-used/> deep fakes", videos that take a time and skill to
create, like fake speeches by politicians, painstakingly created from single
words strung together from old audio, but which never existed in real life.
Rhona says this kind of content doesnt appear nearly as often as the more
shambolic version, which she calls shallow fakes or cheap fakes.
The verification expert says that videos that have been doctored with very
little skill are very common and have convinced millions of people that they
are real.
As an example, she cites the viral supercut of U.S. politician Nancy Pelosi
which made her look drunk, because the audio had been deliberately slowed
down. Rhona says cheap fakes about the war in Ukraine are now turning up all
over the place and the chilling thing is, they arent all that difficult to
create:
"Essentially, you could be putting the sounds of bombs and explosions over a
video, which weve seen as well. Thats a cheap fake. It takes very little,
I mean, I could do it on my iPhone and I could put it out there. That is
more of a problem."
The best way to avoid both accidental misinformation and deliberate
disinformation is to get your news from trusted news sources:
"For me the number one thing is: Who is the source? So, if you are consuming
this from an anonymous social media account, be more sceptical. If youre
consuming it from RTÉ, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The
Times of London; what you have is a group of people who are professionals at
this, who have vetted the information at several stages, so you know that
information to be trustworthy."
Rhona says that the most important thing about any piece of information is
not who shared it before you did, but where did it come from originally? Who
took the picture or the video and who put it online?
If an image catches your eye or a video makes you stop and stare; ask first
where it came from before hitting that share button. Fake is still fake no
matter how shareable it is:
"If you dont know who the source is, dont share it."
Rhona talks to Ryan about more great tips on verifying social media content
on your feed, Silicon Valleys multi-faced response to Russian
disinformation and the power of open-source journalism in the conflict in
Ukraine in <https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/22069818/> the full
interview here
Can I delete myself from the internet?
<https://www.rte.ie/author/952036-alan-smeaton/> By Alan Smeaton
DCU
Analysis: people usually do not realise how much information is out there
about them - and the work required to remove it
There are a variety of reasons why you might want to remove yourself or part
of yourself from the internet and start all over again. You may have
personal reasons, such as embarrassing photos with a former partner. You may
wish to clean up your online presence as you start looking for a job. You
might be concerned about online privacy and the divisive nature of social
media and you just want to get out or you might want to start again because
you are a victim of something like revenge porn.
Whatever the reason, people usually do not realise how much information
there is out there about us and the huge job it is to remove your online
record. First, there is the public part that you control because you created
it, like posts on your social media or comments on <http://youtube.com/>
YouTube. If you have the patience, you can go through those one by one and
remove them.
If it is more than just individual items you want to remove then you can ask
social media platforms to remove you entirely. <http://facebook.com/>
Facebook, <http://twitter.com/> Twitter, <http://instagram.com/>
Instagram, <http://tiktok.com/> TikTok, <http://snapchat.com/> Snapchat
and others all do this but with slightly different processes.
Beware of the difference between deletion and deactivation. Deactivation is
like temporarily retiring and you can return whenever you want whereas
deletion is exactly that, delete forever with no coming back. Deleting
yourself can take weeks to happen, as there being a cooling off period where
you can change your mind. The companies do not make doing this easy because
they don't want to lose you. That is not because they love you, but they
love your data and dont want to lose that.
But even if you do delete all your social media accounts, that doesnt get
you off the grid because you may have a <http://google.com/> Google account
and use that for <https://www.google.com/gmail/> Gmail or when you watch
YouTube videos. You may use it to host photographs or when you use
<http://maps.google.com/> Google Maps or any of the other Google services.
Deleting your Google account would remove all of your settings, preferences,
purchases, and all your favoured sites.
Then, theres the part that you cannot see: your internet usage creates
traces and cookies that you leave behind as you browse the web, or stream
video and audio with <http://netflix.com/> Netflix and
<http://spotify.com/> Spotify. Thats just the tip of it. All of this may be
anonymised and thus impossible to remove from those sites even if it is your
right to do so.
Until October 2019, the <https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/>
Firefox web browser allowed you to see a visualisation of the websites you
visit and all the third-party trackers active on those pages as you browsed
them. Before it closed down, I used it to track my web browsing over the
previous 11 months. I had visited 2,168 different websites, most of them
more than once, and that browsing brought me to the attention of 10,197
third party web trackers. I cant imagine the difficulty in getting myself
removed from all those trackers.
However, if I was really concerned about this, there are ways to make your
digital traces smaller by using internet services that do not track you. The
best example of this is <https://duckduckgo.com/> duckduckgo for internet
searching, or <https://signal.org/en/> Signal for messaging. both of which
do not track your online activities.
While you can delete the parts of the internet that you created and that you
own, you cannot delete the parts created by others. Even if you could, part
of your past may already be archived for anyone to see, as it may be on the
<https://archive.org/> Internet Archive. This is a non-profit organisation
which basically records the internet. It was launched publicly about 20
years ago and has material going back to 1997.
, how to use the Wayback Machine
It works by continuously downloading and storing web pages from web sites
and making them publicly available. To use it, you input a web address into
the <https://web.archive.org/> WayBackMachine, wait a bit because it
usually has to retrieve data from tape, and then it will show you a list of
all the times it has copied and stored that web page. Click on a date and,
voila, it shows you what that website looked like way back in the day.
The archive will visit and download popular websites more regularly than
less popular websites. The
<https://web.archive.org/web/*/https:/www.rte.ie/> RTE.ie website was first
downloaded in
<https://web.archive.org/web/19961114070121/https:/www.rte.ie/> 1996 and has
been copied and saved over 15,700 times since then. The
<https://web.archive.org/web/*/https:/www.rte.ie/brainstorm/> RTÉ Brainstorm
web page was first saved in
<https://web.archive.org/web/20190406122707/https:/www.rte.ie/brainstorm/>
November 2017 and has been saved 372 times since then.
Apart from the public, the WayBackMachine's huge archive of more than 660
billion web pages from the past is used by scholars and journalists. A US
appeals court has
<https://www.theregister.com/2018/09/04/wayback_machine_legit> decreed that
its content is legitimate evidence that may be used in litigation. It has
also been cited as evidence a couple of hundred times in criminal cases in
the US.
Disentangling yourself from the internet is a huge job
Even if you could delete yourself from the internet, you may already be on
the Internet Archive. While you can remove yourself from there, it is yet
more work for you if you are set on removing yourself from the internet.
In summary, disentangling yourself from the internet is a huge job. It is
laboursome, tedious and exhausting - and not guaranteed to be complete. It
is something that you really have to want to do if you are going to do it
properly and you are going to need to dedicate a lot of time to do it even
partially.
RTÉ Lifestyle.
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