Hi I’m John Green, and this is Crash Course: Navigating Digital Information.
So, images are incredibly powerful to human brains.
Like, I read and loved the first four Harry Potter books before seeing a Harry Potter
movie.
And I really liked the movie, but after watching it, I could never see my Harry Potter or Hermione
ever again--I saw only Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson.
And also I learned that Hermione is pronounced Hermione.
And not Her-mee-own.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words -- and by “they” I mean the advertiser
who supposedly coined that idiom in the 1940s.
Photographs in particular feel real and objective to us, because they seem to capture a moment
of reality.
More than 150 years ago, Matthew Brady’s iconic Civil War photographs were often staged,
for instance, his assistants would move corpses and change their postures to maximize the
images’ visual power.
But while images have never been as reliable as they seem, this is especially true in the
era of photoshop.
In fact, consider the image you’re looking at right now.
That flower is not actually here.
If you spend as much time online as I do, you spend a lot of it looking at images.
Sometimes those images are unedited, although even then choices are made--how to frame the
image, what to photograph, when and how to share it.
Other times, the images are obviously altered with bunny ear filters or meme text.
Sometimes images are altered in ways meant to fool us.
So how can we decipher what’s real and what’s not?
Well It’s easy!
You can tell by looking at the pixels.
Meredith says that meme is so old that nobody is going to get the joke.
OK.
Roll the intro.
[intro]
So far during this series we’ve talked about how important it is to find out who’s behind
information we learn online, why they’re posting it, and whether the evidence is reliable.
And thanks to their power, images are a very common form of online evidence.
But just like data or text, image-based evidence can be relevant and reliable or irrelevant
and unreliable.
In order to make sense of our online surroundings it is critical to think carefully about whether
image-based evidence is trustworthy because we’re used to thinking that “seeing is
believing.”
I means, special effects-laden movies are popular in part because they are so visually
thrilling--even though we know they aren’t real, they look real, or at least adjacent
to real.
That is why, for instance, I found all five transformers films completely watchable despite
their lack of … you know, plot, character and comprehensible worldbuilding and etc.
They also have that Shia LeBouef in them.
He’s a fascinating character.
Don’t do it Stan.
DON’T. Oh.
Hello Shia.
So, in movies, filmmakers depend partly on our ability to get lost in images--when we
watch a conversation between two people in a film, for instance, we rarely consider that
forty-five minutes elapsed between this shot and this one, because the camera and lights
had to be moved.
The willingness of the human brain to assume that images are real is consistently manipulated
by filmmakers, but also by other people.
Consider, for instance, this manipulated picture of mass shooting survivor and activist Emma
Gonzalez.
It’s doctored to make her look like she was tearing up the U.S. Constitution instead
of the real picture she took with a gun-range target.
Or this one of President Trump supporters whose shirts were digitally altered to read
“Make America White Again” instead of their actual “Make America Great Again”
shirts.
But images don’t have to be altered to fools us, though.
Sometimes bad actors use real, untouched photos but falsify their context.
And that can have really serious consequences.
For instance, this image of an election in Mexico in 2017 circulated online as a meme
claiming undocumented immigrants were voting in the nonexistent town of Battsville, Arizona.
Or this image of children sleeping in what looks like a cage at a detention facility
for undocumented children in 2014.
It was circulated widely in 2018 as controversy grew over policies for separating undocumented
migrant children and parents at the U.S. border.
Although the conditions were similar for many of the children being held in 2018, when the
photo went viral it was unaccompanied by its original context: the date.
And then once this mistake was revealed, it was used by many to dismiss the entire controversy
as “fake news.”
A study by the Stanford History Education Group has shown just how easy it can be for
people to let images and their context go unchallenged.
So, as you know from previous episodes, the Stanford History Education Group is affiliated
with this series.
They developed MediaWise, which is what this series is based on.
Anyway, during the Stanford History Education Group study, they showed 170 high school students
a photo from Imgur of these weird looking flowers.
The photo’s caption claimed that the flowers had “nuclear birth defects.”
Fukushima was in the photo title, implying they were from the Fukushima nuclear disaster
in Japan.
Despite no evidence that the photo actually showed these effects, or that radiation caused
the mutations, over 80 percent of the students did not question the source of the photo.
There wasn’t even any evidence to show the photo was taken in Japan!
In reality, these daisies are most likely the victims of a genetic mutation called “fascination”
that isn’t related to nuclear radiation in any way.
Bottom line: nature is really wild all by herself.
I mean, do I need to bring back the picture of the star-nosed mole?
I do.
Because it’s so easy to turn images into manipulation machines, when you encounter
a suspicious image online, it’s crucial to investigate who is behind it and whether
they are a reliable source.
We also must look for context, to be sure an image supports the claim being made.
Does the story, blog, or social media post where you encountered the image provide a
link?
Great!
Click it.
If you can get a reliable explanation of that photo and where it came from.
That can help you know if the image is reliable.
Is a caption provided?
Use your lateral reading skills to determine whether the context surrounding the image
is accurate.
But if the source sharing the photo doesn’t provide any context, or they provide a caption,
but no other reason to find that information credible, then maybe you can’t trust it.
But, there are online tools you can use to hunt down an image’s origin story.
Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.
OK, so it’s raining hard in your hometown and you just got one of those startling flash
flood warnings on your phone.
So you hop online to find the latest weather report and a friend has reposted this in your
news feed.
Just saw this on the highway.
Be careful out there, friends.
Oh my god, there’s a shark swimming around the floodwaters in your town.
That’s certainly terrifying -- if it’s true.
Before sharing it with anyone else you want to be sure that it is.
Your friend hasn’t provided any other context or tagged the photo’s location or anything.
She hasn’t said whether she took it or someone else did,
and isn’t responding to your texts.
So it’s time to do a Google reverse image search.
Quick reminder: Google is one of our sponsors for this series, but we also think they have
the strongest reverse image search engine.
If you’re looking for an alternative, TinEye is another popular one.
Right, so, if you’re using their Chrome browser, you can right click on an image and
select “Search Google for image.”
If you’re using a different browser, you can right click on an image and copy its URL.
Then you paste the URL into the search window at images.google.com.
Whoa there -- the search results for this shark photo are full of fact-checking sites
saying that this photo is a viral hoax.
It seems this photoshopped image makes the rounds every time there is a hurricane or
huge flood.
The shark has been “spotted” in Puerto Rico during Hurricane Irene, Florida during
Hurricane Irma, in Texas during Hurricane Harvey, New Jersey during Hurricane Sandy,
and in North Carolina during floods in 2015.
What a shark!
The original photo of this shark was captured in its natural habitat, off the coast of South
Africa.
But after someone photoshopped it into a highway setting,
plenty of social media posts have cited the image as “evidence” over the years.
Thanks, Thought Bubble.
You can use reverse image searches to check in on all kinds of photos.
Using what you know about finding reliable sources, you can then track down whether an
image has originated with a trustworthy source or whether it’s only been distributed on
unreliable sites.
And you can turn to fact checking organizations like Snopes and Politifact which are really
great at hunting down these hoaxes.
And then there’s videos, which can be just as powerful as images when it comes to providing
evidence.
Unfortunately, they can also be used to mislead.
For instance, a carefully edited clip can misrepresent how an event actually happened
or what someone actually said.
At least according to every villain on every reality TV show ever, that’s the entire
genre of reality TV.
It was just the /editing/ that made it /look/ like you were awkwardly breaking up with your
fiancée on national television, Arie.
But also, unedited videos can be posted alongside inaccurate information that claims footage
depicts one event when it really shows something completely different.
Like this clip of me saying “I have messed it up a lot in the past, hence, part of my
aforementioned nervousness.”
Now as it happens, that was about communicating news to fans about my books being adapted
into movies.
But it could be applied and adapted to other things, for instance, if someone said I was
talking about writing my books.
Or my taste in Polo shirts, which is excellent by the way.
You’d only understand what I was talking about if you saw the whole clip, but in another
context it could be almost anything you want it to be.
There is no text without context.
And videos can also be dramatically altered, too.
We don’t always think of videos as easy to change -- maybe by skilled filmmakers,
but not in the same way that we can easily use filters to alter our Instagrams.
But, if you’ve ever seen an episode of Bad Lip Reading, you’ll know that it’s getting
easier and easier to considerably alter a video, or even fabricate one from scratch.
And uploading and posting videos has never been easier.
Almost anyone with an internet connection can do it.
That’s why it’s important to know where a video came from, and who created it, and
whether it’s been altered before you believe what you see.
But the type of manipulated video that freaks me out personally the most is the deepfake.
Deep fake uses deep learning and artificial intelligence to create video images that can
be combined and superimposed onto existing videos.
So, for example, Nicholas Cage’s face can be grafted onto other actors’ faces to create
some really funny movie mashups.
Or, an impersonator can have their voice and facial movements convincingly woven into the
video of a president.
BuzzFeed, for instance, once made a video of President Obama saying things like “Killmonger
was right” to illustrate how deepfakes work.
And this is happening more and more.
The Belgian socialist party once created a video of President Trump saying “climate
change is fake.”
They said they weren’t trying to dupe anyone, but lots of commenters on the party’s Facebook
page did not know it wasn’t real.
Now you can certainly gain clues about a video’s validity by checking the source.
Is it an anonymous YouTube channel?
A stranger on Facebook?
Or a news source you trust?
But to determine for sure whether videos like these are real or fake, we need to read laterally.
Or watch laterally, I suppose.
Either way, open up a new tab and try to find where the video originally came from.
You might be able to do this by using a keyword search based on the content of the video to
see where it surfaces.
Like, in the case of the videos I just mentioned we could’ve searched Obama and Killmonger
or Trump, Belgium, and climate change.
And if the video you’re searching depicts an important event of some kind, you might
find it posted on several news sites.
Or if it’s a known hoax, it may show up on fact-checking sites.
And if the only place you find the video is on dubious sites or random social media posts,
it’s probably bogus.
But look, as technology advances and changing photos and videos gets easier and easier,
there will be more and more deep fakes, and it will be much harder to tell them apart
from reality.
That freaks me out, and it’s a reminder of how critical it is, especially for young
people, to learn how to evaluate the quality of information they encounter online.
Because without using our lateral reading skills, and looking for additional context
for images we encounter, we risk being duped by bad actors spreading misinformation.
And as I’ve talked about before, when the quality and reliability of our information
decreases, the quality and reliability of our decisions also decreases.
So that’s why we’re going to continue learning how to interrogate different types
of evidence next time. I'll see you then.