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Comment by patwolf | Hacker News Reader

I'm old enough to remember back in 2005 when terrorist in Iraq claimed to be holding a US soldier hostage, and it turned out the whole thing was staged using photos of a doll:

Original story: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/02/world/africa/rebels-say-t... Confirmation of hoax: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna6894934

It's pretty easy to see that the photo is a hoax, but many news outlets didn't notice and ran the story anyway.

I have little faith in our ability to detect deepfakes using these recommendations. It seems we'll have to assume something is fake unless we have a way to cryptographically verify its provenience.

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I always have to think of the Wu Ming Foundation/former Luther Blisset collective and their fake news/LARPing missions[1] that showed how easy it was to fool major news outlets back in the 90s. Too bad that now those same techniques have been weaponized with great success.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Blissett_(pseudonym)#Li...

See also the Daily Mirror and Piers Morgan: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/may/15/mirror.politic...

Loved "Altai" and "Q", the historical fiction they produced (under that pseudonym and "Wu Ming")!

Interesting lecture on the connections between Q and Qanon by Wu Ming 1, also detailing some of their LARPing and hoaxing exploits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdcAT7pXYko

Wow, this originated in Bologna and I've never heard of it? Very cool, thanks for sharing.

>>It's pretty easy to see that the photo is a hoax, but many news outlets didn't notice and ran the story anyway.

More likely: many news outlets didn't CARE and ran the story anyway.

This is the problem with for-profit news outlets, they can't afford not to run the story that others are. State-run news outlets is also not good.

NPR seems to be one of the most reliable sources in America.

Reliably left wing? Yes. Reliably truthful? No.

Please link me a single story you think NPR was untruthful about.

I can't say I agree with the person you're replying to, but i distinctly remember being quite shocked by this https://edition.cnn.com/2012/03/16/tech/mobile/npr-american-...

to be fair, that article is about PRI, not NPR. They are not related.

NPR dutifully ran the "Saddam Weapons of Mass Destruction" *fake* 100s of times with utter sincerity.

ps- also the "dumping babies on the ground" fake too IIR, but maybe only a few times on that one. Congressional testimony on camera by a daughter of a State Department official IIR to justify the Kuwait invasion by Bush I

True, but not evidence of the left wing bias originally claimed at the top of this thread

Almost every issue on the 2A they discuss is untruthful. The Rittenhouse case comes to mind immediately where they lied about all the encounters that were proven wrong in court. They avoid anything that makes the left look bad. Lying by omission is still lying. They continuously link stories to racism, lgqbtq, "people of color" that have nothing to do with any of that as well.

Keep listening to them if you want. I used to be an avid listener, just realize that they've lost a TON of loyal listeners due to their heavily biased reporting in the last few years.

Here's a fun one for ya. They backtracked on it after not getting away with it but there are many many more where no one notices and they just get away with it.

https://news.yahoo.com/npr-claims-limited-scientific-evidenc...

not really possible since the people that planned and staged the thing the story was about were pretending to actually do something when they hired people and rented things to fake an origin story that was then covered by the news while another team that the first team wasn't aware of went a bit overboard and brought in surface-to-air missiles and shot down a passenger plane full of dying people.

you see, the issue is not NPR being untruthful. the issue is NPR not even having a chance to check. member how "logic"/"rationality" works on faked premises? so smooth and yummy.

NPR is high in factual accuracy (they very rarely lie) while being extremely selective in the stories they tell and the facts they omit to push their bias. They seem to be worse in that respect than they used to be.

I think that's still much better than a news source that just outright lies to your face whenever it's convenient. As long as you remember that the bias is there, you can at least trust what they say is the truth. When a news org tells a mix of truths and lies you don't even have a foundation of trustworthy fact to start from.

Truth does have a left-wing bias.

that'll be a great line for the next struggle session

Sounds like something a totalitarian would say.

I think it just implies that there are a lot of right wings lies in the media.

No, it implies that it's not possible lie if you're left wing and if you tell the truth then it must likely be left wing. Mainstream media is almost all left-wing and all of them lie or omit truth.

What's the solution? A powerful enough regulatory framework to fine (or otherwise punish) proven misinformation?

Even then it's probably hard to prove that insufficient checking was performed at publication time

Perhaps ban them from receiving advertising revenue. Force them to go subscription only. Advertising revenue comes from clicks, not reads, we want people to actually read and contemplate. This is closer to what old-school newspapers did.

In theory, subscribers will leave outlets that lie to them for outlets that are more honest and fact-based. Or, if I'm pessimistic, subscribers will give money to whoever does rage-bait the best...

Ban advertising supported information sources. If people want information they need to pay for it in order that the information serves them not the people with a budget for manipulation.

You could I suppose allow adverts where the information is strictly for entertainment, but given that was Fox News defence... I think it probably wouldn't work.

That is not really more likely. Most news outlets don't actually want to have a horrible reputation.

Yes and if other news outlets were already tricked, they could run an even better news story about that.

News operations live and die by eyeballs and clicks - they will say or report anything if it will give them more traffic, or if it appeals to their audience; don't kid yourself, getting you to click on a news story - true or not - IS the goal.

They ran the story as a claim that a US soldier was taken hostage, not as a fact that a US soldier was taken hostage. From the NYT article:

"The authenticity of the militants' claim Tuesday could not be immediately verified. Defense officials at the Pentagon in Washington said that the U.S. military was investigating the incident but that had no indication any of its soldiers were missing in Iraq."

>I'm old enough to remember back in 2005

How to make someone feel old. All the way back to 2005, eh?

Someone born in 2005 is a freshman in college now.

If I take a photo with a cryptographically signed camera of a polaroid containing an image that i deep faked, how does that ensure the image can be trusted?

Depth channel?

I've seen pretty good depth estimation algorithms that work off of 2D images, even without the use of AI.

Those depth estimation algorithms can't be used to distinguish a photo of a photo from just a photo. They will report false depth in a photograph of a flat photograph.

Yes, that's my point. You can't rely on the depth map in the image metadata to be the differentiator because it can easily be faked with depth estimation.

I trust that you took an unaltered picture of a Polaroid.

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