Fake News: Disinformation, Deception, and Magical Thinking Over Time

(Dis)Believing What You See

To modern eyes, Frances and Elsie's staged photographs are not particularly convincing (though there are some who are still willing to entertain Frances's claim that the fifth photo was authentic). The ease and awareness of digital image manipulation have contributed to a more savvy viewing audience in the early twenty-first century than existed in the early twentieth; of course, many of the same tells that a modern viewer might notice were pointed out by contemporary debunkers.



As audiences grow more sophisticated, so do methods of media manipulation. There has much attention recently to deepfakes, which use machine learning trained on video or audio of a particular person to generate new video or audio of that person saying things they never actually said. Deepfakes can be created with humorous or malicious intent, and awareness of them makes the public less likely to trust that any media is authentic.
 
  1. How does your desire to believe affect your willingness to be accept information that affirms or contradicts your assumptions?
  2. Dismissing any surprising image or video as fake can be every bit as harmful as believing everything that you see. How do you balance healthy skepticism with openness to new information that contradicts your assumptions?

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