Fake memes: Why are they created?

 

     I keep considering leaving some social media sites -- too much time spent and too much extraneous material. But then, how would I keep track of birthdays? Also, I spend a lot of my time posting fact checks on fake memes that people pass along without checking. I recognize that people, in general, are not likely to ever start fact checking before passing memes along. But, I don't want these inaccurate memes to continue spreading across the Internet, to possibly thousands of people, without comment. Just maybe, such fact-checks will stop one or more "shares" of a fake meme and slow its cancerous spread.

     So, why are these fake memes created so often? There isn't a single reason, but I believe there are some categories that handle most.

     Note that these categories apply to those who create fake memes. They are aware that they are false -- or that they express things for which there is no proof.

• Immaturity. People take pride in seeing their lies spread across the Internet. They can tell themselves, and friends, "I did that". It is analogous to arson -- setting fires just to see them burn and spread.
  
  
• Hatred. People have hatreds. They may hate people, movements, companies, organizations, religious groups, political parties, people with special attributes, countries, people with blue eyes, whatever. It would be wonderful to have a world without hatreds -- but we haven't reached that point yet. People who hate want others to hate also -- it makes them feel as if their hatred is rational. So, whatever they can say (occasionally true, often false) that can incite hatred in others to legitimize their hatred is "good".
  
  
• Profit. There have been a number of "exposé" articles about people who have websites to churn out fake memes and messages. These sites have "click-through" advertising links that bring them income (sometimes a lot of income -- in the hundreds of thousands of dollars).
  
  Sometimes the income comes from governmental or private organizations. The sites are used to promote the organization's agenda. These sponsored sites often have teams of trolls to spread their misinformation and incite screaming matches rather than constructive discussion.
  
  
• Political. This certainly includes one political party doing the traditional activity of saying bad things (sometimes true, often not) about the other. But it also includes countries with dictatorships who want to consolidate their power by hiding what is really happening within the country.
  
  It includes groups of people hired by governments to foment trouble within other countries. As the saying goes, "United we Stand, Divided we Fall". Alas, there are always governments wanting other governments, and their people, weaker. Domestically, creating an atmosphere of fear and anger is a great tool for groups wanting to manipulate people.

     Fake memes would be no trouble if people recognized them for what they were. They would be humorous -- considered to be irony and satire and part of the genre of literature from MAD magazine to the Onion.

     Alas, many people find the fake memes all too easily incorporated into their beliefs without bothering to see if they are true. And the more fake memes that are incorporated, the wider the boundaries of belief get as the fake memes get farther and farther away from any tentpoles of reality.

     If people want to stop this creation of new realities, then they can choose to do fact checking when they encounter memes, tweets, posts, newsletters, or emails. It is true that doing fact-checking takes more time and effort than just believing, or rejecting, them. Fact checking can also be very, very hard to accept when the facts differ from existing beliefs. Rejection of facts is much more comfortable than a re-evaluation of beliefs.

     If people want to check facts, there are various places (Berkeley's list of fact-checking sites) to help you in your efforts. If you don't trust any of the existing fact-checking sites then you can learn to do your own fact checking. The Poynter Institute for Media Studies offers a number of courses -- some free, others for fairly low fees.

     After checking, there are often more than two possible verdicts -- a spectrum from "you have to be kidding false" to "yes that is completely true".  Some are out of context such that they sound real but really aren't. Some are true in "broad strokes" but have poor numbers and statistics. A person can choose to pass along a verified meme -- perhaps with comments to better explain them. That is of great value. I would hope that the recognition of "I did that" would feel better for a spread of something verified true than from creation of a fake meme.

     Fake memes are far from harmless but they can be dealt with -- with hard work.

Data Silos: not just storage

     Many moons ago, I had a summer part-time job building grain silos in southern Kansas. Grain silos are buildings -- presently usually built with aluminum and concrete -- which allow storage of grain (corn, wheat, barley, oats, ...) such that they are contained, out of the potential rain, and on a dry surface. This allows them to stay good for an extended length of time and not rot.

     I haven't worked on a grain silo now for a long time. But I spend a lot of time trying to break down data silos. Data silos also keep things around for a long time. Some (mis)information within data silos may have been circulating for a decade or more. They also keep the data contained -- the data is circulated amongst the other sites and organizations that are within the data silo.

     The silo is delimited by internal consistency. Stories and sites within the silo refer to each other, repeat what others say, and report or create new information based on the information already being circulated within the silo. If you believe "A" to be true then you will only see information about "A" being true. If you believe "C" to be false, then you will only see information about "C" being false.

     As is true in many areas of life, there are actually a spectrum of truths that are happening. Event A is happening. Event B is happening. G said Y. G also said Q. One silo may report on A and G saying Q -- but nothing about B or G saying Y.  Another silo may report only on B and G saying Y. Thus, at times, multiple data silos can each contain A reality -- but a carefully maintained subset of reality.

     I mention creation of information. In other words -- fantasies, misdirection, lies. Why would a person or site deliberately create false information? I am not talking about someone who has "passed along" something false because they don't have the motivation to check to see if it is true first. I am talking about deliberate creation of false information. Why would a person or site do that?

     One reason is a desire for self-promotion. For an individual, their name gets associated with "information" that is exciting or motivating for others to remain in their data silo. For sites, there are often factors of advertising dollars or political inclination. Some "news" sites have teams of data creators -- very similar to the teams of script writers used for comedy shows or other variety shows that used to be popular. And, of course, there are sites and individuals who are not who they say they are -- international or domestic organizations who desire to maintain and intensify the divisions created by data silos.

     There are tools available to help a person break out of a data silo -- to get a more balanced (and, overall, much more accurate) view of what is going on. There are sites that evaluate general reliability. and bias ("right" or "left") of information such as that published by Ad Fontes Media. There are various "fact checking" organizations such as Politifact, Snopes, and FactCheck. There are two problems about these tools being used to break out of a data silo.

     The first, and most confining one, is that you have to have some degree of trust that the site, itself, isn't biased and deliberately giving a distorted view. Most of the more trusted sites, as listed above, are well liked AND disliked by many points in the spectrum of thought. That is probably a decent yardstick by which to measure. Deliberate information may, however, be more concentrated in certain areas -- the Ad Fontes Media graph can only point this out for well-known public information sites. The private sites that report, or create, information are not evaluated.

     The second, and possibly most difficult to change, reason that people do not try to break out of their data silos is that they don't want to. They are comfortable. The information may comfort them, or make them angry -- but only in the ways that they already are oriented. No confusion -- only yes/no, true/false -- and no spectrum of items.

     I talk about people breaking out of their data silos. Can't an outside person break another person out of their silo? No, I don't think so. Change of a person's ideas, or behaviors, has to be rooted in their own desire. That desire may be based on outside things (a new significant other, something so outrageous and blatantly false that it makes the ground shake, a drastic change of environment, ...) but the desire must be internal.

Can everything be faked? Digital editing and manipulated data

     Spoiler alert -- once upon a time (in 1993) a murder mystery movie was released called "Rising Sun". Part of the evidence was a digital video of an area which presumably was the time/space where a murder took place. It turned out that the digital video was edited (but not quite carefully enough) to fake the evidence.
     In 1993 (25 years ago as of the writing of this blog), this was relatively new to ponder. We knew that photos could be doctored/changed/altered but, in this movie, a central point was that digital video could also be changed. (Once changed digitally, film copies could be made if desired.) Twenty-five years ago, this took a lot of time and many computers. Doing such a thing still requires a lot of processing power but that power is now available on many home computers (or even phones or tablets).
     We are seeing this capability ad nauseum within the social media. Within less than 24 hours, a new set of memes, photos, and sometimes videos are released purporting to prove something or call something out. Some are real. Sometimes it is obvious (quotes from Lincoln about the Internet SHOULD be immediately recognized as fake although I have found that a lot of people tend to believe them) but often it is not. Sometime the source is a public satire, or irony, site and "should" be recognized as such by those that read them -- but they often aren't. This happens on all segments of the political spectrum.
     An awful lot (too much) of the time, a forgery is only discovered to have taken place by recreating how the fake was created (such as finding the original photos that have been merged together).
     The foundation problem is that if it CAN be faked, how does one determine the primary reality for this particular universe? For articles and "news" segments, it is possible to research multiple sources, find a general agreement from various sources and determine with a high probability (but not 100%) what the reality is. What does one do about forged supporting documents? It is not easy, but it is possible, to find component parts from various photos, videos, sound recordings, and such to be reasonably sure that something has been compiled together, and manipulated, into a different item -- a "photoshopped" photo, an edited sound recording, and so forth.
      However, we are reaching the point of being able to synthesize (or create) from scratch whatever we want. Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) has gotten so good that, for films, they sometimes deliberately make it appear less real because people can be annoyed if they think it is "real" when it isn't; they like to know it is CGI. That objection doesn't apply when the person, or group, creating the artifact WANTS to have it be accepted as real.
     As per previous blogs, this doesn't just apply to distorting current things of interest -- it can also be applied to faking history and re-inventing the past. Nor (as per other previous blogs) can we rely on memory to be sure. There are those who do not remember what was said by a politician the previous day.
     So, to attempt to answer the question posed in the subject -- can everything be faked? Probably so. As is true that social change falls behind that of technological changes, our ability to create fake items is overwhelming our ability to prove that it has been done. What methods of verification do you use? What can be done to more easily separate the close-to-true from the false? Is this just a new reality that we need to accept and learn to deal with?

The Foundations of History Tend to Shake: could the Holocaust fade away?

     The last of the surviving veterans of World War II are making their passage from this world. Also, the last of the survivors of the Holocaust. Together, this means that -- out of the many thousands of direct and indirect witnesses to the atrocities of the Holocaust -- very few remain and soon there will be none still alive.
     So, why does that make a difference? It is recorded in history and references are still taught and read. It happened, has been very well documented and proven, and is a tragedy from which we can learn for many years. Right?
     Alas, such is not necessarily the case. History is always in the process of being rewritten. Sometimes it is a result of more information coming to light -- excavations, first-hand documents, physical proofs and artifacts. Sometimes it is a matter of documents and artifacts being lost or deliberately destroyed or suppressed and then denied.
     At its best, history is a tiny slice of what has happened at a particular time. Choices are made as to what to include and what to omit.  History, or "His story", tends to focus on males throughout history -- such that women's accomplishments are forgotten, overlooked, or attributed to men associated with them. Histories are also "written by the winners" and the losers of wars and other confrontations often have their records destroyed or omitted -- certainly they are de-emphasized. Also, the history writers make choices from the materials available. Who, and what, is "important"? Do they talk about the war leader or do they talk about the woman organizing and leading the cooks to feed the army (or the family)? Is the life of the baker considered to be as important as the Duke? Do the details of the life of a peasant get equal emphasis to that of the local feudal lord? Even during peacetime, the accounts and records will be more in depth for those of the ruling segments.
     At its worst, history can become fantasies to support the current people in power. Perhaps out of shame, genocides, massacres, and evils done by humans to other humans (such as slavery) have a great tendency to be obscured or their realities warped. Some people try to "clean" history -- change the language used within books, change scenarios and such so that it meets present-day standards. That is also a method of falsifying history. A third category is to deliberately create fake documentation to support misinformation that the person, or group, would like to present as the truth.
     A very active and well-known Anti-Semite wrote a "scholarly" book concerning his anti-semitism. At first reading, it looks very well-researched, objective, and persuasive. It is not until the "references" are further checked that the fabrication becomes clear. The references are "circular references". The references are to people and their works who then refer back to the author or to other people to whom he references. In other words, the work supports itself by having a group of people wanting to present a falsified world view support, and "authenticate", each other. There is no connection to real world events or first-hand accounts. It is all a built up fantasy that SOUNDS like it has a basis in fact.
     So, with history's inherent limitations and vulnerability to falsification, how CAN valid history be protected? To quote Pilate, from the book of John, "What is truth?"
     There isn't an easy answer. History can never present the full truth -- it is inherently limited by access to, and choices from, data. Constant vigilance is needed to prevent deliberate, unsubstantiated, changes to history and acceptance of falsified data. The primary defense that exists is a solid educational background for the general citizenry -- to allow them to judge, to research, and to understand (such as going deeply enough to locate circular references).