First, I hope everyone fared well during this weather, and my thoughts go out to those who were gravely affected. Seeing
everyone’s post-hurricane updates and photos on Facebook and Twitter reminds me
of our class discussions, and my previous posts, where we’ve talked about the
increasing spreadability of content through social media. At the same time, the likelihood of
misinformation escalates as well. The growing presence of “prosumers” and
user-generated content heightens the need for professional journalists to
verify fact from fiction. Certainly, the picture above is a gross exaggeration,
but not all the “fake” photos are quite as easy to spot.
Examples:
More photos and details of the verification process can be found in this article in The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/sorting-the-real-sandy-photos-from-the-fakes/264243/
Kristie,
ReplyDeleteI found this post and the story that inspired it very interesting. I also came across a lot of photos online that turned out to be fake. Interestingly, I did not even consider the possibility that they would be fake until I saw a picture that looked like it was taken straight out of "The Day After Tomorrow." When comes to events like Hurricane Sandy and other natural disasters, do you think there is still a tendency to believe what one reads or sees online? I found myself asking the question, who would post a fake picture of a natural disaster? What would be the point? After researching the topic a bit further, I realized that this may be another case where social connectivity and technology may not actually make people better prosumers but mindless copy/pasters. It would be easy to see a "cool" picture of the storm somewhere and repost it without any consideration to its legitimacy. When it comes to something like Hurricane Sandy, do you think our social networks make us more cognizant or just gullible and insensitive?
Thanks for your comment, Olga. You bring up some great points. To answer your first question, I do think that people generally tend to trust the news they see and read online, especially in this Internet age where we end up developing some level of trust in Internet interactions. In regards to natural disasters, I think people are more likely to accept the “fake” photos as real because we only expect facts to be reported in dire situations. I, too, wondered why people go to great lengths to make “fake” photos. I came to a similar conclusion: people just re-post/re-tweet images that they find “entertaining” and as that image spreads, what started off as a joke to one person gets taken out of context and ends up in the news. Of course, as exemplified in situations like these, we can’t take everything at face value; this stresses the importance of using careful judgment and the need to be critical towards what we consume online.
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