BBC 英语学习 News Review 你能相信网络图片吗

Fake, fake, fake news. And im Sam and this is fake news, fact and fiction from BBC Learning English.

In the program today, we are talking about images, and we meet viral image to bunker.

Paulo odovesa things that you need to look out for when you're looking at a viral image.

You want to look for any science of manipulation.

Tell tales that it's been edited.

Before we go to that, though, sam, I'm looking forward to your vocabulary session.

What are you going to be telling us about today?

Well, today he go, I am talking about the world of deceit and the words con scam, fishing and hopes.

There have always been people who want to take our money, and the Internet and social media have provided criminals with different opportunities to try and con us.

The verb to con means to deceive, to trick, to cheat.

And the noun acon describes the method of chicken.

E.g., on social media, you sometimes see competition with fantastic prizes, like a car for a boat, and all you have to do is like the post and share it to have a chance of winning.

Many of these competitions are cons they're not real, and are designed to get us to share personal information, which many people will do because they want to win the prize.

But no one ever wins. And the people who run the con have collected lots of person data.

The word con dates back to the mid to late 19th century, and is a shortened version of confidence man, which was the term for a person who was able to persuade people to give him money in return for a service that was never given and was not what was promised.

This was known as a confidence trick, or a contract, and now just a con.

A similar word for a con is a Scammrs are much newer word, though, from the late 1960s, and in most cases, it can be used in the same way as ul And beware of scams.

The people who are trying to trick you A good piece of advice is, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

A very modern type of scam is fishing.

The term was coined in the 1990s, and is a variation of the word fishing.

The scanners are fishing for your personal details.

This has often done through emails, which try to get you to log onto a websites that looks like your banks, but it's actually a fake site from which the fishes collect your log in.

Another type of scam that has been around for centuries, but is also popular on the Internet are hoaxes.

A hoax is something that has been created to trick you into believing something that isn't true.

This could be a fake news story.

But hoaxses are also common with photos and videos.

Take this one as an example.

If someone claims with authority that its proof of the existence of the creature known as Bigfoot, it's a hoax, because it's just a person in a hairy costume.

Thanks, salmon. That leads us all nicely to today's topic about images.

Yeah, so there's an old saying that the camera doesn't lie, but I'm not so sure we believe that anymore.

Well, the camera can only record what it says, so in that case, it can't lie.

But what we are told was seeing the image is not necessarily what the image actually is.

Yeah, so the camera doesn't lie, but people do, yeah, well, that's a good way to put it.

And of course, with the digital tools at our fingertips today, we can change, manipulate, or even create a completely digital image that looks like real photograph.

Yeah, but now we're not talking about just putting a nice filter on our social media selfies, are we?

No, there are few different ways images are used to tell a different story to the one that was photographed.

One thing we see a lot is real images.

They're not fake or photoshopped, but they are from a different time or place.

The caption states, yeah. So the caption on an image can also be misleading in the way it describes what is happening in the photo, particularly if it generates strong emotion.

Yeah, well, here's an example. Look at this picture, and it might make you feel completely different emotions depending on how it's described.

Amazing. I saw the police helping an injured protester.

Terrible.

I saw the police attacking an innocent protester.

So what do you think, sam, do you think the different captions tell a different story?

Definitely Yes. So those two captions illicit to completely different emotions, but which one is right?

Without a wider context, we wouldn't know which one was correct.

So that's not the only way images can be misleading.

It's not just captions. Images can be cropped, manipulated and edited to out things that were never there or take away things that were there.

In fact, it's so easy to do this now that an aged relative of mine, who shall remain nameless, removed and in law from a family photo and replaced her with a bush.

That photo now hangs in the living room, and unless you really examined it closely, you wouldn't realize at all that someone was missing.

I'm glad I'm not in your family.

Sam. Now, most mainstream media organizations are very careful about the images they use and how they are described, particularly if those images have come from members of the public.

On social media, though, anyone can publish an image and say anything about it, and that's where people like today's gas to come in.

Paulo Odovesa is a viral image to bunker.

He's known as Big patent on Twitter, and spends his free time verifying images, which seemed to him to be not quite right.

It's an activity he took up while working as a contractor, and NASA, who spoke to him earlier and asked why he does it.

Well, partly, I I'm just pedantic.

I'm a stickler for accuracy. But partly it's also that I get annoyed at seeing digital art, seeing manipulated images passed off as real.

And in a sense, it's it's unfair to the people who made them, because you've robbed them of attribution.

You rob them context and credit.

And I want to see justice done in that sense.

But on a grander scale, it's also that small lies can later lead to bigger lies.

I've seen, I've seen cases of viral image purveyors who just grab stuff off red later be cited in bigger contexts.

And the damage they can do is amplified significantly by the nature of social media.

I've seen people go from historical photos and go into full blown health conspiracies about the pandemic.

I've seen nature photos lead to equal fascism.

So, you know, it's the kind of thing I'd like to see nipped in the bud before it leads to grander, more harmful falsehoods.

So is this artist work been stolen without credit?

Fake and edited images being published as real?

And also people who do this using their popularity on social media to promote conspiracy theories and radical action.

But how do we know that an image is fake, copied or misleading?

If you do this a lot, you can spot the signs easily.

But for those of us with last experience, here a few tips from Big Paddock.

For one thing, there's context. You want to see if is this image too good to be true?

Is it too lucky? Sometimes a photographer will get lucky, but sometimes that image is manipulated.

Also, think about, um, what emotions these images Earnest are eliciting in you?

What? What are they trying to make you feel or think or do?

What is the publisher's aim? Are they trying to make money?

Are they trying to become more popular?

Are they trying to manipulate your view of the world?

And things that you need to look out for when you're looking at a viral image, you want to look for any science of manipulation.

Tell tales that it's been edited.

Sometimes the edges are too blurry, sometimes the edges are too sharp.

Sometimes the light sources are different, and Lucy shadows coming lucy shadows in different directions.

Sometimes the perspective will be wrong, or you'll see artifacts of Photoshop clone stamping, or you'll see repeating patterns that indicate that something has been that something has been copied.

A few things to look out for.

There some technical, some emotional we've seen throughout this year is that many examples of fake news are designed to generate strong emotions, and photos are no different.

Yes, this doesn't mean that every emotional, interesting or spectacular image is suspicious.

The latest baby picture from your family is probably not fake.

But with your critical thinking

head on, when you see images that make you feel upset, angry or outraged, it might be worth taking a deep breath and doing a bit of investigating before

you think about sharing. And how do you investigate an image?

Hispollo Odevesa Again, with a practical tip, the 1st thing I do is plug the image into a reverse image search, to like Tin Eye or Google Image search, which has to reverse image search.

If you click on the little camera icon in the search bar, and that will show you repeat occurrences of the image across various websites, and how far back the repetition school.

I have to warn you that the the oldest or the largest image are not always necessarily the original image.

So you have to be able to tell from context from the site, if that it is actually the photographer or the digital artists original image.

Also, if I found that if you search for the caption, if you do a phrase search, by entering the caption in courts into Google or duct Ducco, as I use, you might find a red post or some other social media post where the image was 1st posted already Image 1st became popular uncertain photography sites, you might be able to find the metadata for the image, or the exit data, as it's called, and that will tell you things like what camera the was used to take the image, what lens they use with lens angle, what f stop would exposure, but it will also tell you what software the image has been through.

I remember that Photoshop is not necessarily assigned that the image has been manipulated, or at least has been faked, because sometimes a photographer will take an image in the photo shop and do some minor enhancements That that doesn't mean the image has been completely fake, but sometimes it may mean that, again, you have to consider context.

So such for the caption. That's a good tip.

Yeah. that's also a good thing to do.

If you see a controversial meme, you know the ones there's a photograph of a politician or another public figure and a quote next to their image, which is supposed to be something they said or were said about them.

Put that quote into a search engine to see what comes up, and you'll be able to see if it's a real quote or something that's made up.

That's very good advicer to that all the time.

And the other good suggestion is to do a reverse image search.

Are you familiar with that song?

Yes. So that's where you search using an image rather than text to see if that same image has been used before on the Internet.

Shall we do a little demonstration?

Yeah, let's do it. So let's take this image.

Let's imagine someone has posted this picture online today with the caption The media isn't covering this but their violent demonstrations outside Parliament.

Please share. Mmm. Okay. So I'm using a site called tin Eye, which is one of the ones power imitant.

I drag the image into the box here, and then I let it do its thing.

It then shows me all the examples of this image it has found.

You can sort by date and see that this image has been present on the Internet since at least 2012, so it can't be from something that happened today.

The image is genuine, but the description is misleading.

Thank you. Some very useful tips there.

Now, would you please remind us of today's vocabulary?

Yes, of course. I'm going to start by picking out a word that we've used a lot today, which is manipulate.

To manipulate an image means to change it or edit it in some way, to deliberately mislead.

And as we've discussed, you can also manipulate emotions.

I guess Polo said that he was pedantic, which I am about grammar, which means being very concerned that things are correct, often things that other people are not that worried about.

And that he is a stickler for accuracy.

When you are a stickler for something you expect or demand a certain level of behavior.

If you see this phrase, you will see it mostly with the noun accuracy or rules.

Two words which mean nearly the same thing, are con and scam.

These are dishonest schemes designed to chick people and take their money.

The people who carry out these schemes are con artists and scammers.

Fishing is a type of scam.

It's a trick designed to steal your banking information by getting you to log on to a fake website with your real details.

And a hoax is

a kind of deception, something designed to make you believe something that isn't true.

Thank you, sam. It's very easy to manipulate images today, and images can be used to manipulate our emotions.

So

be skeptical, be vigilant, and share safely.

And remember that just because it's on the Internet doesn't mean it's true.

And if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Goodbye, goodbye.

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