How Does it Feel to be Lied to?

Abbey Blashinsky

ab659218@ohio.edu

 

 

Do You See the problem?

 

From the beginning, social media and journalists have been manipulating pictures, videos, and moments from the world. Sometimes, as we sit on our phones and stare at our screens, we often forget how many pictures or videos could be photoshopped or filtered well.

 

This has made some generations lack confidence and grow up with insecurities because they feel the need to be perfect with no flaws due to social media. This is only the beginning of what can cause an effect with publishing fake content. 

 

Let’s take a step back and go through the archives. 

 

Let’s go Bring it Back

 

Years ago, advertisements, magazines, and more have been trying to make major edits and changes to their content. An article from Oddee,com has a piece on the ‘10 Most Famous Doctored Photos’ going way back in time. Pieces that I found were personally distasteful and borderline disgusting to know about. Photos of dead people being killed in the country of Georgia. Are they really dead? According to one of the photos, a nurse was carrying a dead woman but the woman was clutching the nurse's arm… Sometimes, I simply can’t wrap my head around why journalists, or anyone would want to make a fake image. 

Picture source: BoredPanda

One that astonished me was from 2001. Where someone combined two images of a great white shark and air force training to make it look like the shark could practically eat the soldier. 

Enough of the nonsense. Moving forward to our current generation, it is easy to see fake images or extremely edited photos or videos on the daily. I don’t think fake images or videos will ever stop, it will just keep getting worse. 

 

Can We Trust What We See?

As I wrap up this blog, the decision we all need to make is, do we trust what we see now on the internet? I often feel like when I am on social media, I instantly think everything is real. I sometimes forget to second guess a video. What really opened my eyes was TikTok. 

Quite a number of the videos are not real and they try to adjust the content to make it look real. Because nowadays everyone is trying to be an influencer and get what our generation calls ‘clout’.

The bottom line is, are we going to still believe everything we see, hear, or watch? Forbes wrote a phenomenal article explaining why we oftentimes instantly believe everything we see. 

The Forbes article, ‘Why Do We Trust Online Images And Video?’ will open most of our eyes to both perspectives and make all realize what we should and should not trust.