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Re:Twitter to label deepfakes and other deceptive media by michaelt on Wednesday February 05, 2020 @05:12AM (#22245493)
> Nice PR move for non techies.

Depends if the praise they get for "at least they're doing something/not pretending the problem doesn't exist" outweighs the criticism they get for false positives, false negatives, inconsistency/bias, arbitrary judgements, response times, or labelling so many things fake that it becomes meaningless.

Way back in 1994, Time magazine published a photo of OJ Simpson that was photoshopped to make his skin darker [1] - but having some colour-correction of magazine cover photos is inevitable. The line between regular and deceptive colour correction is blurry, and some people will be upset no matter where you try to draw it.

[1] https://people.southwestern.edu/~bednarb/su_netWorks/project...

Re:Twitter to label deepfakes and other deceptive media by makomk on Wednesday February 05, 2020 @05:54AM (#22245706)
If they get the right false positives, false negatives, and bias, it might enhance their media reputation overall. For example, a while ago the White House posted a video of an altercation with a journalist which a lot of journalists believed had been manipulated to make it look worse than it was. Now, this obviously wasn't true on looking at the video, and indeed a couple of outlets hired video forensics experts who concluded this - but AP managed to find a non-expert who was merely a video editor and confirmed their belief by mistaking signs of frame rate conversion for the video being sped up, and the press ran with it.

Meanwhile, there was an a very convincing deceptively-edited video circulating on Twitter which clamed to show parts had been sped up by overlaying the White House version on the original - it was very vivid, with the overlay seeming to jump ahead in fast-moving parts. This was an illusion created by running the videos 7 frames or so out of sync the whole way through and abusing the fact the slight differences weren't noticable in slow-moving parts during normal playback. No-one noticed. Youtube fighter of misinformation Captain Disillusion even helped spread it and gave his approval.

My general reckoning is that Twitter would get much more praise for labelling the non-tampered video as misleadingly edited and endorsing the accuracy of the video that was misleadingly edited to make the other one appear that way, than the other way around.