TRUMP’S POLITICAL POWER IS DEPENDENT ON CONTROLLING A FALSE NARRATIVE

The photo-shopped picture that Russia tried to blame Ukraine for shooting down the Malaysian Flt 17

 

 

Political operators will push fabricated videos and images that are entirely believable, yet completely false.

 

As I have continued to state, the basis of a living and operating democracy is totally dependent on the voters in the system receiving good information in order to make good decision in the voting booth.

 

Well, what the current president has done to this nation, is even worse than his constant lying and his attacks on those outlets that provide good and proper information.  You know, those that he calls “Fake News".  Well, it has now gone even further. 

We have since seen Trump’s followers that literally will yell at real-time reporters, those that give us good and real information, which may also offer a true criticism of the president, but that the Trump fan will be yelling, “Fake News” at the reporter.

 

In our brave new on-line world, it’s all about to get worse. Hollywood and entertainment technologies that thrill moviegoers and gamers are becoming more available to those who create that, “Fake News”. Soon it will be easy for anyone to fake highly credible photos and videos, and they will make it hard for us to believe our eyes.  This has made it vastly harder to establish the real facts in our politics.

 

Over the past few years, investigators have started to collect and analyze visual information for its validity.  This includes satellite imagery that can expose war crimes, and those videos and photographs shared on social media and in messaging networks that document anything a witness might see.  This would include abuses by police, to the aftermath of a chemical weapons attack. In these cases, seeing is believing…Right?

 

Or is it? Abusers of the truth have learned that they can twist the investigators’ methods to their own purposes.

Consider, for instance, going back to July, 2014, when the Russian government, in their use of satellite imagery, used it as “evidence of falsehoods”. You may recall back then, when a Russian-developed missile shot down the Malaysian Air, Flight 17, over a part of the Ukraine controlled by pro-Russian rebels.  The crash killed all 298 persons on board.

But the Russian government  had fabricated satellite imagery to link the missile to Ukrainian air defenses. Investigators later determined that the imagery had been altered in Photoshop.

 

With the aid of the troll factories we’ve heard so much about to spread disinformation, where any perpetrator can sow doubt about even the clearest of crimes and abuses. As political scientist Stanley Cohen noted in 1996, denials by abusers tend to take standard forms, including literal denial, such as: “nothing happened”, to: “what happened is really something else.” Though the techniques may be new, creating doubt about any reporting is, and always has been, a “pre-digital tactic”.  It’s a method that Donald Trump has used for decades.

 

Yes, some investigators have developed methods for assessing the truthfulness of digital evidence, methods widely and openly shared within the political community. But of course, the disinformation peddlers know these methods too, thus they creat doubts about issues that should be totally black and white, as to what is true and what isn’t.

 

But wait, it’s now about to get worse

 

Nearly anyone with a laptop and an Internet connection can now distort visual reality to offer highly realistic, but utterly fake, photos and videos of events that did not occur.

 

Using technology called “DeepFakes”, even a hobbyists can now transfer video images of one person’s face to the video of another person’s body. This technology, also called “Face2Face”, has spawned a thriving, competitive community of amateurs creating clever mash-ups of people and faces.  That has allowed the users to paste celebrity faces on the bodies of pornographic actors. One example of the technology, so far mostly used by computer scientists, allows users to animate the facial gestures of selected “targets” with the facial gestures of another person.

 

Another artificial-intel technology is called : “Generative Adversarial Networks”.  It makes it easy to fabricate faces, intricate cityscapes and landscapes, and anything else base on a number of photographs, to establish artificial neural networks.  They are visually very believable, but totally false.

 

All this strains the concept that “seeing is believing.”

Those hoping to deceive, conceal or confuse us will now have all these important new tools that go well beyond Photoshop. We’ve learned under President Trump, just how quickly false claims can spread.  Given what a computer scientist Emilio Ferra and his colleagues note, “The novel challenge brought by bots is the fact they can give the false impression that some piece of information, regardless of its accuracy, becomes highly popular and endorsed by many.”  This is why Donald Trump can continue to fool such a large portion of the American public.

“DeepFakes” will add visual “evidence” that will make this situation much, much worse. More sophisticated operators will push relatively easy-to-create fabricated videos and images that are entirely believable, yet completely false.

 

Fake news that you can “see” will be politically explosive in many ways.   At what cost will investigators demonstrate that satellite images of mass graves or chemical weapons attacks are real, not fabricated? Denial campaigns will become increasingly sophisticated and investigators will struggle to keep up.

In this new world, real political power has become ever more dependent on controlling the narrative. The ability of independent fact-finders to go against the masses of disinformation will determine much about the integrity of the record, and our ability to hold political power to account, such as that of the current US president.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2018