As I am completing my homework assignment, a ring is heard within from my headphone. I let my fingers stop typing and glide over to the track pad where I search for what list of tab made that noise. My eyes scroll from right to left to find I have a new message on Facebook. The message is from a classmate which quickly answer. My Facebook timeline begins to refresh and I see recent content from my friends. Some content is their status updates while others are posts they have shared, I begin scrolling down and watch several clips of funny videos but cease when I read the headlines, “Trump Offering Free One Way Tickets to Africa & Mexico For Those Who Want to Leave America”. My immediate reaction is, “Wow the president must really want to only have a specific group of people in the US or he is granting their wishes”. I open up and begin reading the article but stop reading when the source is from TMZ as I never considered them a credible source of information. Yet, when reading and viewing the article, it was well written and structured, giving no indication that it could possibly be “fake news”. At the time, I had not been keeping close attention to the political election, so I assumed it could be something Trump would say as he is known for saying some outrageous material. In the next coming days, I would see the repeated pattern in my timeline, clickbait and fake news. Scrolling down I would read unbelieveable titles such as, “Florida man dies in meth-lab explosion after lighting farts on fire” or even “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President, Releases Statement” titles like these were obviously fake news as they included typos and other giveaways. At the time, I did not understand the magnitude that fake news could potentially have on the presidential election or even the beliefs of a person, until my Software Engineering in Residence professor who worked at Facebook admitted that Facebook does contain and spread fake news. Perhaps, the source of fake news appearing on our timelines is not simply because our friends are sharing it but because of how believable it appears. There has been a vast amount of audio and technology advancements over the course of the years that may widen the gap of what is real or fake news. At Stanford university technologist created technology that can alter the facial expressions of a person in a video in real time. Furthermore, these alterations are not cartoonish but high quality and believable. In this clip, a video of former president, George Bush is shown while at the side is a man making face expressions. At the side by side comparison, George Bush is performing the same facial expressions the man is performing almost as if he did them himself. It made me think of some of the clips I have seen online and wondered if they were altered. In addition to this, a product nicknamed, “Photoshop for audio” was demoed at the annual Adobe developer conference. According to the website, “The product allows users to feed about ten minutes of someone's voice into the application and then allows them to type words that are expressed in that exact voice”. In the original recording a man is recorded saying, “In the morning I kissed my dog and my my wife”, which is later turned into, “In the morning I kissed Jordan three times” and it sounded exactly like the voice of the person! What if someone altered the audio of the president when he is speaking to a foreign country? Technology such as these have the potential to influence the mentality in which people view and think of their country and of the president and in the future I hope there is a clear line of what is real and fake news.
6 Comments
Karina Pizano
2/22/2017 07:45:36 pm
Yeah, I think I have read a few articles that spew nothing but lies. It is unfortunate that these sources like TMZ do not really care about the news that they put out to the world, their only goal is to put out information and have people clicking on it ,reading it, and sadly believing it. It is really easy for an educated / smart person to be able to distinguish false information from real information. You can either search for a similar topic, usually when information is real not only one source talks about it, or you can simply tell. The new technology is great, but also dangerous like you mentioned. I think fake news is unavoidable, the only way to get around it is to know or search more on the topic.
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Martin Almaraz
2/24/2017 06:35:34 pm
I agree that the fake news is hard to spot at times, and having such ridiculous and true things happening in the US leads to some more of the outrageous and fake stories to flourish a bit better in the social media sites. All I can say is that I know that fake news has been spreading quite a bit lately, and what my advice is to always fact check everything. The possibility of it being fake only grows if there is only one site reporting on it, and looking at the past credibility of the site also helps.
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Benito Sanchez
2/25/2017 05:42:25 pm
I agree that there have been so many fake news and it is hard to determine which one is real! I always try to look for the similar topic on other news reporters to confirm if is real or fake. Your last thought really shocked me! As you stated, if it's true that people's voice could be used to change what they're stating, perhaps someone could have gone as far as changing Trump's statements and we just believe! It goes to show that although some technologies seem to be fun and amazing, they could also be used in a negative way.
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Fernando Madrigal
2/25/2017 11:19:38 pm
I do agree with you about considering TMZ as "fake news" because TMZ is only for entertainment by grabbing a few actual facts about what a person said and twist their words. Fake news is everywhere you go on the web especially in social media. There are pages in social media that lies about a celebrities death, crimes, and ordinary peoples life's. This is a serious issue that it is currently happening since people tend to believe anything that pops out on their screen. My recommendation is to look for news from liable sources that you know or buy a newspaper.
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Laura Chavez
5/8/2017 02:39:56 pm
Often companies only care about the number of clicks on a headline, because it produces the most revenue. Often when I'm scrolling through Facebook and see an article title that catches my eye, I look at the website. Sometimes it's TMZ, sometimes it's some random website like "notable.com"; what usually comes to mind when I see this is "fakenews". We should definitely look at the credibility of the source before clicking "share".
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AuthorFirst generation computer scientist that loves football. Archives
May 2017
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