Olivia Roman
lr330519@ohio.edu
Believing the first thing we hear, read or see has been an ongoing issue within Journalism and its audience. Many lack trust in the media, but why do most not fact-check, compare, or research what they are reading or seeing?
We all have busy lives, so sometimes, it's easier to believe the first thing that pops up on our feed. Sometimes, we believe what we first see if it aligns with our personal beliefs. Sometimes, only one version of a falsified photo or video is produced, so it's harder to tell whether it's fake or not, as there is nothing to compare it to.
Doctored photos and deep fakes
As technology grows and becomes more accessible, opportunities to become an expert on doctoring or deep-faking already existent media to create fake news. Unfortunately, many people use these techniques to deceive their audience and make it look like something happened that indeed didn't.
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| Source: IGN Boards |
Doctoring a photo can include taking a picture or using one of a deceased human on a floor and adding a different background (like a beach) to alter the story, and all-around produce fake news when it did not happen that way.
In a NiemanLab article, they refer to a term known as deep fakes, a practice where artificially intelligent people can deceive others using synthetic media. As pointed out by the Generative Adversarial Network, deep-fakes are a little more technically adverse and becoming more readily available for all. For example, they allow people not to doctor a photo but make a person say something or have them act in a certain way in a video.
Some techniques they share with us are face swaps, lip-syncing, facial reenactments, and motion transfers. As the Niemanlab article provides, a journalist correspondent, Jason Bellini, experimented with the technique of a motion transfer.
Motion transferring includes transferring the movement of a body in a source video to another in a target video. For example, Bellini made his body move the same as that of Bruno Mars, simply by taking a video of him standing and transferring the movements from one of Mar's music videos, deceiving many that he could dance just like him.
Is confirmation bias the issue?
Confirmation bias is when our minds already have formed opinions, allowing doctored or deep-faked media that align with our biases to be deemed believable. For example, in a Nesslabs article, Robert Davies is quoted as saying, "the eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend."
They also state the idea that many humans think they are objective thinkers. However, a male who thinks females are horrific drivers may believe an edited video or photo of a woman causing an accident, rather than a female wanting to defy that stereotype and double-check to see if the photo was altered or misconstrued.
Many interpret media by subconsciously seeking and favoring a biased perspective they already believe in. That also goes for information that wasn't doctored or deep-faked but edited to leave things out.
If someone is against a Black Lives Matter protest and the first thing to come across their page is a video of the protesters going wild, they will make assumptions before fact-checking or researching to ensure there is no missing piece. However, if they found the whole video, they might realize that the protesters were reacting to something edited out.
The same thing happened with a now-famous young man, Nick Sandmann. A video made Sandmann, who was wearing a "Make America Great Again" hat, look like he was mocking and harassing an Omaha tribal elder.
However, when more of the edited video came out, some realized the first video was misunderstood and taken out of context. Some against Trump and his supporters may have believed the video right away, without seeking the complete edition.
What can we do?
We experience many mind blocks without even knowing, and this may be why we are allowing these creators to deceive us and take away the truth of our nation as we know it. We need journalists to investigate before re-posting. We need to stop these deep-fake creators, photo shoppers, and editors by letting them know we are willing to take the extra step to fight against their deviations.
Will this stop? As technology keeps advancing every day, the only thing we can do is investigate what people are feeding our minds with. Try not to let bias get ahold of you, as it only allows the deceivers to win.
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