People used to call social media a minefield; now it's an actual war zone. Platforms are flooded with content relating to the conflict in Ukraine. Misinformation could cause actual 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 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 It’s shared, Rhona says, the harm is done:
"The other one is misinformation. And that’s the regular person who sees a video on TikTok of Ukrainian soldiers saying goodbye to their families and they think, ‘that’s 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:
"It’s actually videos that have been taken out of context, so, we’re seeing that quite a lot in Ukraine. There’s a ton of videos of old training exercises that people are saying are taking place in Ukraine; you know, old video games we’re 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 she’d come across in her work verifying online video:
"There’s this one going viral at the moment and it has been for the last week and it’s from a 2018 movie and it shows these soldiers saying goodbye to their wives. Now, it’s 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 don’t 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 it’s real:
"A lot of the time they are actually poor quality, so people are like, ‘well, it’s just poor quality, that’s 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 "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 doesn’t 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 aren’t all that difficult to create:
"Essentially, you could be putting the sounds of bombs and explosions over a video, which we’ve seen as well. That’s 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 you’re 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 don’t know who the source is, don’t share it."
Rhona talks to Ryan about more great tips on verifying social media content on your feed, Silicon Valley’s multi-faced response to Russian disinformation and the power of open-source journalism in the conflict in Ukraine in the full interview here.