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Wednesday, March 9, 2022

Shutting down disinformation online is up to you

While swiping through TikTok last week, I spotted a video of a Ukrainian fighter jet knocking a Russian fighter out of the sky. The scene initially shocked me. But the TikTok of the so-called “Ghost of Ukraine” actually came from a video game.

Lies about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine spread quickly these days on social media. One post falsely identified a Palestinian girl confronting Israeli soldiers as a Ukrainian child challenging Russian troops. Somebody else might post phony tweets supposedly from Russian diplomats. Others might portray the war as a hoax.

Facebook (FB), TikTok, Twitter (TWTR), or YouTube (GOOG, GOOGL) may try to clamp down on lies, but social media giants will never stop disinformation completely. The endless falsehoods about the pandemic and the 2020 election demonstrate that much. That means it’s up to you to stop the spread of fake content.

“Every individual has some responsibility, and there's definitely things they can do to prevent the spread of misinformation,” explained Gabrielle Lim, an associate at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.

While it’s a lot easier to spread disinformation than stop it, users themselves could be the best tools for purging social media of a mounting pile of lies, particularly about the war.

Videos and photos are often real, but their descriptions aren’t

Let’s start with the most compelling false content online: visual disinformation. According to USC Viterbi School of Engineering professor Wael AbdAlmageed, visual disinformation comes in two main varieties — repurposed media and fake media.

Repurposed media takes a real photo or video and re-captions it to fit another group’s narrative.

“For example, somebody will claim that a [video of a] Ukrainian soldier killing somebody in Russia [is] why Russia invaded Ukraine,” AbdAlmageed said. “The video itself might actually be correct, but it might be from a completely different part of the world that doesn't have anything to do with Ukraine or Russia.”

You’ve likely come across images and videos like this either during the war in Ukraine or the pandemic. It’s easy to fall for these images, because the picture or video itself is real — the poster has just stripped it of its context.

Outside of repurposed media, watch out for manipulated media, or videos and photos that others have either concocted or altered to change their meaning. These can include the aforementioned Ghost of Kyiv, or deepfake videos using artificial intelligence to create digital versions of world leaders or celebrities who say or do things that never happened.

One famous example of this kind of video depicts a digitally altered version of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying he has access to stolen data of millions of people. Videos don’t even need to be altered much. One infamous video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was purposely slowed down to make her seem drunk.

You could have a tough time discerning both forms of manipulated media from reality, especially when they fly through your Newsfeed or timeline. To combat that, AbdAlmageed suggests doing a reverse Google Image search of the suspect video or photo. That should tell you where the media originally came from or alert you if it’s completely fake.

Recognizing what’s real and what’s not

What’s the fastest way to stop lies online? Chiefly, you should get your news from legitimate news sources rather than a video your Uncle Ted posted on Facebook.

Unfortunately, nation states and groups associated with them can manipulate those too. This tactic involves creating a nearly identical version of a real news site, complete with articles, with a slightly different URL, usually something you’d enter as a typo in your browser’s address bar.

“We tracked one network where they would mimic CNN, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic. But what they would do was buy domains that were instead of Theatlantic.com, it'd be Theatlantic.co, and they would copy the entire website and just change the headline,” Lim explained.

That level of obfuscation would trip up almost anyone. The best way to fight back? Check to see if multiple sites have reported a story. Then check the original website’s URL. If it’s not right, then it's fake.

Read before you share

Another way to recognize disinformation? Read. Don’t just check out a crazy headline and share the story with your followers: Read entire articles and fact-check anything fishy.

“Read laterally, read across,” Lim said. “If you read something on one site, cross reference it with a number of other sites. That's the first thing I would do.”

That’s especially important in times of crisis. People will try to exploit the vast amount of news coming out of Ukraine to manipulate the narrative and fool as many people as possible.

“We've had this sort of sense of urgency, in a variety of other conflicts,” explained Ari Lightman, professor of digital media and marketing at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College. “But that's a perfect time for disinformation to rear its ugly head. And people misconstrue … facts and information, and then share all that on social platforms … Once it gets out there in the public sphere, it almost becomes fact.”

If you’ve spoken to someone who believes what they’ve seen on Facebook, whether it’s a lie about the 2020 election, pandemic, or Ukraine, you’ve seen this kind of thinking in action.

So if you’re sick of conspiracy theorists using Facebook as a megaphone, then start analyzing news before you share it. Otherwise, lies will proliferate across multiple social media platforms until they effectively become facts — at least to you, your followers, their followers, and anybody else who clicks and shares without stopping to think.

By Daniel Howley, tech editor at Yahoo Finance. Follow him @DanielHowley

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