Fake News Isn’t New, And Neither is Altered Photography

Brandon Goddard

bg468718@ohio.edu

Due to the 2016 presidential election and now-president Donald Trump abusing the phrase “fake news,” there has been a myriad of discussions about the concept in the news world and outside of it. News organizations, politicians, and the common social media user have adopted the phrase to describe the current new environment. That’s a problem, it has become a go-to instead of the outlier.

The frequency of its usage has increased drastically, with over half of the population claiming to consistently see fake news on social media sites such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Social media poses a particularly dreadful and direct avenue for inaccurate or even unfactual beliefs can be propagated. It is something that needs to be addressed as immediate as possible, but social media is not where fakes news did not find its origins on just social media. Legitimate fake news has a long history spanning back to to when photography became available to the general public.

Just because Photoshop is only considered a modern tool now, it was not impossible or unlikely for altered images to surface and gain credibility before being debunked as fakes. For example, Joseph Stalin’s reign as leader of the Soviet Union during the 1920’s was rife with the trend. Many of Stalin’s public photos were notorious for having doctoring to remove old friends or comrades who had fallen out of his favor.


Even simple, innocuous things such as children not wanting to get in trouble for telling small lies had spread as legitimate news in the past. In 1917, a little girl and her friend faked photos of them playing with fairies through drawings. The mother shared the photo around and convinced the public that the spirit world was a genuine thing, even the creator of Sherlock Holmes took it as authentic and believed it to be evidence of the spirit world.

Essentially, fake news is not a new thing, but it has become a trend due to the abuse of the phrase by people such as Donald Trump and the easily done, anonymous spread of misinformation on the young, still vulnerable world of social media. Photo manipulation is a particularly egregious tool that has been utilized for differing agendas over the course of its existence, but now it is more accessible than ever and even those not completely infatuated with technology can attempt it.




There’s free alternatives to Photoshop such as gimp and even image editing on smartphones. Fake news has always existed through misinformation and altered photography, but thanks to the tools available to all it’s more simple to accomplish ever than before.