Bellingcat: Separating Fact from Fiction on Social Media in Times of Conflict

[ancianita]

https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2023/10/26/separating-fact-from-fiction-on-social-media-in-times-of-conflict/

DU'ers are smart and clear-eyed catchers of disinfo, so here's a summary of both obvious and not so obvious tricks.
With each numbered how-to is at least one example of media disinformation and how each was debunked.

Here’s how to separate fact from fiction with real, recent examples of misinformation.

1. Be Cautious
Treat all footage and claims with caution. Sometimes real footage can be attributed to false claims and vice versa...

2. Think Critically
Particularly about big, incendiary claims. When big news stories hit, we see a lot of recycled footage posted on social media. Recycled footage is footage from other conflicts or time periods that are published as if they are from the current event.

Often details in the footage like signage or other details in the surroundings can give a clue to the true time or place the video was taken...

3. Check the Source
Responsible researchers will always name the source of footage they share or analyse. Too often footage goes viral without a source—let alone an original one—listed. Be cautious if the source of the video or claim is unclear.

Simply checking the source listed can often quickly debunk any suspicious claims. TikTok videos re-shared on other platforms, for instance, usually have the original poster’s username watermarked onto the footage...

4. Remember that the Same Location Doesn’t Mean the Same Incident
Even if the footage is from the area, it doesn’t mean it is from the same event.

One simple way to check is to use Google reverse image search on video screenshots to see if they’ve been posted before...

5. Be Savvy to Manipulation and AI Generation
When all footage or photographs connected to an event go viral, you often see accounts pop up distributing manipulated or altogether fake imagery. Free and easy to access AI-powered image generation tools have now made this type of content faster to create and more common.
Although not always accurate, tools like aiornot.com can help disprove claims quickly...

6. Be Cautious of State Actors, Which Sometimes Share Staged or Unreliable Footage
In times of conflict, it is not unknown for state actors to imply bad faith on the part of their adversaries. In some cases, staged videos appear online...

7. Know That, Sometimes, News Organisations Get it Wrong
When you discover new claims about footage, always check for a secondary media source, ideally one that has obtained the information independently of the first source. News organisations and leading figures can sometimes use quotes from each other as sources of information (see an example that we found here) and sometimes verification steps slip through the cracks...


8. Protect Your Mental Health
Watching footage from war zones can cause trauma.

Be careful viewing unknown footage. There is almost always an abundance of highly disturbing content circulating during times of conflict.

Always ask yourself if there is a genuine reason you need to view this footage. Organisations like Bellingcat have teams of researchers trained to view such footage with therapeutic support in place to assist them. If you do find something that needs attention, you can share it with a trusted news source rather than viewing it and amplifying it yourself.

If you are an open-source researcher, you can find Bellingcat’s guide explaining ways to better protect your mental health whilst undertaking this role here. The Dart Center also has robust advice on the risk of vicarious trauma.

Here's a an award winning documentary by bellingcat

[mopinko]

1. google image search is very, very useful.

i use it all the time on fb, sometimes to the annoyance of some of my more gullible friends.

[ancianita]

6. Indeed. You instantly have

a greater range of sources than most who post on FB. Better for straightening out the facts of domestic conflicts than the foreign ones, which is also why belingcat posts its tips.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

2. If you meet the buddha on the road, kill him

Fundamentally, if you wanna believe a factoid, try to explode it. If it survives attempts to find it false, then it is probably true or nearly true or mostly true or usually true.

What I see commonly in reich wing and magat cult posts is a search for confirmation. For example skating over or ignoring contradictory facts and details. Or cherry picking. Or completely misinterpreting statistics (most commonly taking a percentage of one thing and inappropriately applying it in calculations over different sets).

Disproof is the fundamental principle of science, since science admits its knowledge is and always will be incomplete and imperfect. Many people think science is all about proving things. Nope, that's mathematics. Science tries to disprove theories. What remains standing after multiple attempts is pretty good.

So it is similarly with our navigation of a bountiful infosphere that we imperfectly understand and apply against imperfect knowledge of history and any given current situation. We should subject anything we'd like to believe is true to a battery of tests to try to eliminate it for bad source, internal contradictions, use of propaganda techniques, cherry picking, contrafactual claims, distortion, slant, assumptions, ....

I am reminded of the famous koan: "If you meet the buddha while travelling on the road, kill him!" Being a koan it has multiple meanings and contexts and flexibilties, but one simple prominent one is the idea that if you think you have actually found the truth, put it to the test.

[ancianita]

4. I read the book! And glad you've laid out so well what it means here. A helluva post, and many thanks.

I'm bookmarking it.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

3. Example whereof I speak, obvious, but for analysis

(Even if we for the moment treat the given data as fact, ...) The error that is completely ignored and glossed over is that if you truly implemented the premise, the outcome would be very different from the map. If voting were one single day in person only then almost all mailing in ballots would vote in person and vote the same way they would otherwise. The false premise is that large numbers of people would hold to "mail-in or nothing".

But of course such bogosity in the structure of the argument completely demolishes any trust in the data that might have been briefly entertained.

Naturally, we dismiss the whole thing pretty much at the beginning when we read the contrafactual characterization "Marxist Criminals".

However, that kind of argument (map) is frequently just accepted and nodded at.

[ancianita]

5. That's exactly the problem with disinformation -- those who use it KNOW that it takes more time to unpack its

'dis' part, and KNOW that it's much easier for its broader audience to drink it down as fact based political argument.

That "Marxist Communist" line, in this audience's mind, has already been threaded way back to Eisenhower, when Fred Koch's John Birch Society literally referred to him as a communist. Right then and there they got started on the last Republican who was elected without having to resort to election fraud or disinformation. It's now been in their DNA since Gingrich/Reagan days.