Hunting fake news redux

Cong Corrales .

“We have to shame these f****** ignorant bastards.” – Herbie Gomez, editor-in-chief, Gold Star Daily, on how to deal with purveyors of fake news

THERE has a resurgence, of sorts, of fake news posts lately. I say “of sorts” because I have already an app that filters this digital garbage off my browser. If you’re interested, you can download this app at https://fakeblok.com/.

There are zero fake news website and posts on my social media account because of this app, except for an occasional post of friends who want their online friends to know that these are propaganda websites.

Lately, however, an undersecretary of the Department of Energy has been sharing fake news and has even admonished his online friends to be like UK’s Queen Elizabeth who supposedly praised Digong Dada based on a “news” article (false) published on altervista. The account has since been taken down by Google.

What concerns me is that high ranking government executives have been sharing this propaganda website on social media lately. There’s Mayor Richard Gomez who shared the same fake news the DOE undersecretary shared.

As a public service, I screen captured the website and pointed to the features lacking for a legitimate news website. Yesterday, I checked that particular post again and saw that it has been shared 136 times. Now, that has encouraged me since it tells me that many people have grown tired of the lies and propaganda that are passed off as news on social media platforms.

Hence, I will share again the tips I’ve learned on how to hunt these propaganda websites.

So how can we scrutinize a news website or a post on social media platforms in particular and the Internet in general? Here are some tips:

1. Check if the uniform resource locator (URL). URLs are the web addresses of the articles on the Internet. Many propagandists have intentionally made web addresses to look these are from legitimate news media organizations. Examples of these include ABCnews.com.co, Bloomberg.ma, cnn-trending.com, NBCNews.com.co, washingtonpost.com.co, etc.

Notice that most of the fake news websites have a suffix “.co.”

2. Read beyond the headline of a news post. I, as I assume you do too, see these almost all the time on Facebook. People sharing “news articles” based on the headline but have not really read the entire article. Worse, they will caption the link with an inappropriate comment because as I said they haven’t really read the article.
3. While you’re reading a news article, check for exaggerations. Fake news is meant to rile up or elicit strong emotions to drive web traffic and further inflamed on social media platforms. Naturally, the fake news would have exaggerations.
4. Check if the data presented in the “news article” is corroborated or supported by experts in the particular field or other news media websites. Okay, that sounds more daunting of a task as I would have preferred. Maybe this acronym can help GIN (Google It, Numbnuts).
5. This next tip will sound idiotic but believe me many have done this–sharing a news article without checking the date of publication. Digong Dada’s drummer boy Peter Lavina did it by posting a photo of a rape victim meant to rile up support for the war on drugs. However, the photo was from another continent, Brazil and from an entirely different timeline. So before you share, check out the date and location, huh?
6. Always cross-check the site with other reliable sources on the web. Real news articles may differ in angling, perspective, or even syntax but these will always have the same basic accounting of the story. Like if there are two reporters of different news organizations covering a story, they might approach the story differently but they will always be, essentially, the same story.

You may find it hard to believe but there has been a deluge of fake photos on the Internet too.

You need to look at the following to spot a fake photo:

1. Shadows. I summarize photography as the art of taming shadows and light. Look for inconsistencies in the subjects’ shadow in the photo. For example, if the shadow of a man in the photo is leaning at a 45-degree angle, everything else in the frame should have the same 45-degree angle-leaning shadows.
2. Light source. Inversely from shadows, the light source of the whole frame should be global. The bounce of the light source on the subjects in the frame should be consistent with the shadows these set. This means the light source should be at the opposite end of the subject’s shadow.
3. Discoloration. This usually happens when a subject introduced to a photo is a clone of a subject from a different photo. If you can see discoloration on the edges of a subject in a photo (read: inconsistent color from the main frame), chances are the photo has been manipulated with a photo editing software.
4. Pixilation. This is akin to the presence of discoloration in a photo, except that instead of color inconsistency there’s inconsistency in pixels of the photo. This happens when the photo editor clones a subject from a different photo and placing it on a new photo without considering the image size (read: dots per inch or pixels per inch) of the photo the photo editor cloned it from.