Strategies to fight fake news and find the truth | Ajla Obradović | TEDxYouth@ISPrague

you all know the advantages that social media has brought to us like choosing places to visit using geotag or swipe up to learn more about a product to place food a phenomenon and the news swiping up to read news with eye catching headlines or seeing them shared by your friends on their feeds has never been easier the problem with news stories today is which ones are real the other day while I was preparing this talk a friend texted me she was so excited she sent me a link and a link to this story so let's

clear this up from the very beginning no new Harry Potter movies with the original cast are not happening in the magical time of Photoshop audio and video editing artificial intelligence posing as real people how can you be sure what's real it's pretty hard now not to say impossible to reverse the cycle of overproduction of news and fake news going viral now you all know about the big media out there the ones you know are credible but you are not staying informed by reading only those specific media right you follow real-time events on Twitter you watch

live videos on YouTube you even watch your friends go live from some event and that's why you should be able to tell if the user-generated content that even the mainstream media is sometimes using as a source is authentic now let's play a game in which I show you an example and if you tell me if you think it's real is it real raise your arm if you think it is yeah it's real it just it's me but the camera has five kills you know that right so I host a weekly show the design and created

only for social media within an international media organization another of my tasks is to think of the ways our stories can be published on social media like this one it's a video explainer about the complicated the political system in Bosnia and Herzegovina okay now that you've met me let's move on to the next example we're entering an era in which our enemies can make it look like anyone is saying anything at any point in time even if they would never say those things is it real this is a dangerous time moving forward we need to

be more vigilant with what we trust from the internet chameleons Jordan feel together oh it's busted CEO Jonah Peretti produced this video as a warning to all do not trust everything you see they use Adobe After Effects and fake app an artificial intelligence program soon you might be able to trick your family and friends with videos like these but there is a big issue in using these techniques for malicious purposes or recently someone what's up made this it says that a few Arab children tie their dad's would share with balloons it also says that the

poor guy was saved by a helicopter three days later in Oman was it real of course not the original video is actually a commercial from a real estate company in Dubai and the rescue images are actually images of a rescue of a woman who died climbing a mountain in the United Arab Emirates after revealing this to my friends I started wondering am I the one in charge of crushing their hopes and excitement no I started wondering should we all be checking every news story out there this must be exhausting for the news consumer don't mind

me it's my job but for you sadly we can't rely on social media to clear up the mess that is fake news content Facebook and Google had initiatives that would help you distinguish fake from real content but they never made it to mainstream part of the problem problem is that social media companies are also relying on artificial intelligence along with human labor to scrape the networks a lot of that content can't be missed or simply wrongly labeled and it's the content you see everywhere it's the commercials you see selling you health products with real consumers

whom they created by taking someone's photos from a dating website yes that happens as well so be careful read those tiny letters it's the YouTube videos made with intent to trick you and in the end is the news we all consume every day so I am sorry to tell you this but if you want to stay informed you should be able to do a bit of digging and here are some of the basics you should be paying attention to when it comes to the website make sure you check its domain be careful with the domains

like com coal or similar ones also check the about Us part that might help you understand their point of view what fact-checkers would advise you is that if you can't find an about Us part contact or address that should be your first clue something is wrong also but since there is a cycle in which when one fake news closes another one opens quite often by the same person they usually don't pay attention to hide their registration details you can use the tools like the main big data or who that is that will show you who

are the people who registered the website often you can find their contact him for address and in some cases even name in emails further on you can check the author what he or she published before and in the text itself make sure you check the grammar and all caps credible in serious media usually avoid using all capital letters and they check the text for the grammar and next look for citations and sources in the text because lack of these two should sound on the alarm when it comes to photos they are often used for different

purposes let's say this image was used in the media after one of the protests of the Army veterans in Bosnia and Herzegovina following this image is a dramatic caption about a man who was thrown in the river by the police now was this image fake no but was it authentic also no see this image was taken during protests in 2014 and it was used in the media few years later to falsely portray an event that never happened so we don't become a victim of fraud falsely presented images you can use reverse image tools that will

show you when the photo appeared on the web in the first place you can use t9i reverse image search and there you can type in the URL of the photo and it will show you where the photo appears on the web you can also use image Google calm the process is similar you either upload the image or type in the URL now you know when you take a photo with your camera or your phone that there are a lot of data written in that photo you can see them but they are there let's suppose someone

sends you a photo claiming that it represents some event but you are suspicious what you can do is you can use any of the active tools on the Internet exit stands for exchangeable image file format and that's way you can see that way you can see when the photo was posted which camera was used and in some cases even the geo tags don't feel discouraged because even the media workers are having a hard time trying to work their way through this maze because other than being accurate there is also pressure of being quick on time

and in some cases maybe even the first one to publish and in this process it might be easier to skip the process of double-checking information because the clock is ticking and the competition is fierce also the problem is that more people will see fake news than the real one or the debunk story behind the fake one that's why sometimes I have my moments when I ask myself why and to who whom am i doing all this when sometimes all I can see are negative and disapproving comments well because of the three things first someone taught

me that we are not here from the people to like us but rather to tell the truth second if there is one single person that learned something from my work every day that's motivation in us and lastly because of the truth itself the Internet is forever and whatever you publish there will stay there that's why in the end you want your signature of the truth [Applause] you