Avoiding visual scams during disaster coverage


By SB Anderson

Hurricane/Superstorm Sandy brought out the Photoshop cockroaches and social media streams were rife with phony images of the storm. (The Atlantic has a good collection as well. Ditto on IsTwitterWrong).

Some were pretty obvious, such as the one of awesome circular storm clouds brewing over the Statue of Liberty with  cascade of rain mid-town for effect  (although the foreground showed calm waters and a small sun-lit pleasure boat that most certainly would not have been out in that weather). 

Obviously, the first line of defense is your own internal BS detector — if it looks too good to be true, it probably isn’t real (SOURCE: National Directory of Cliches That Count). 

But there are other steps you can take if your BS detector’s needle isn’t landing in the red zone on either size of the true/false meter.

Google Reverse Image Search. Upload an image or paste in a URL and Google will try to match similar looking images. Here’s what it found for that phony Statue of Liberty pic:

Another tool with a similar approach is TinEye. Uploads and links both work, just like Google. Here are the results for the same test. 

            

Another service with a different approach is Foto Forensics, which uses “Error Level Analysis” to show you patterns in a photo that might suggest a section was pasted in. Here is its take on the statue image, suggesting the light area might not be part of the original: 

       

(Be sure to read the comments this this post for at least one shot of skepticism about the ELE route).

And the fakery wasn’t just about images. At least one notorious tweet about the New York Stock Exchange being flooded caused quite a stir — and red faces — as well.  The source has finally fessed up and apologized. (At least we’re pretty sure that’s a legitimate Twitter account….)

“Staunching the tide of information becomes almost as important as opening its floodgates, and separating fact from fiction becomes the ultimate curation,” David Holmes notes on Pando

SOURCES AND RESOURES