Deception
Let’s face it. We’re all liars. As Jeff Hancock points out in his Ted Talk, we lie at least once or twice a day. While the effects of these white lies are, most of the time, very minimal, it shows how natural it comes to us. Ironically, while we all lie, we’re pretty bad at detecting when others lie to us. Sure, in person there are at times certain cues that might signal someone is lying, but most of the time they fly right over our heads. This is especially important now when as Professor Fallis points out in his blog post, “we are really living in a digital world.” The element of human contact is stripped and leaves us only with the internet of things.
I’m sure that we, as people who grew up around technology, are more adroit at scouring the internet, but to those who are new to its capabilities, it’s foreign. They can be easily deceived and manipulated, sometimes unintentionally. From personal experience, I can recall my first interaction with The Onion. It was during a practice AP English language exam. One of the articles we were asked to analyze was from The Onion. As 15–16 year old, we had never heard of the satirical media company. To us, the published article seemed legitimate since it was after all in a College Board exam. The article was talking about a new shoe insole with bio magnetic properties (I probably should have known since it said “pseudoscience” in the title). It wasn’t until the teacher explained that The Onion is known for making satirical articles that we finally understood that the article was BULLSHIT, as Harry Frankfurt would say. While its intentions were not to deceive us, other people aren’t as fortunate to have someone tell them that the article is satirical.
This is an example of a source that has been looked at and confirmed to be truthful in what they do rather than what they post. The Onion is not lying to us because it has been established that they post satirical content purposefully made to sound ridiculous. However, without prior knowledge of this, their brand can seem legitimate.
While post like this can unintentionally deceive, there are those that purposefully deceive us. Take the various snapchat filters, photoshop, and Deep Fake programs that morph the our faces to look like something else. Take this YouTube video of what appears to be President Obama giving a speech, only to find it is Jordan Peele using a Deep Fake. The message included also speaks for itself, can we trust anything we see on the internet? If technology is capable of replicating people’s entire faces and emotions, can we trust those we see on video media? Is the strategy of looking for verification of the source rather than the information put out by them an effective way of mitigating deep fakes and other deceivers? If not what are some alternatives?