By Georgia Wells, Shelby Holliday and Deepa Seetharaman
A decade ago, at a pro-immigration march on the steps of the
Capitol building in Little Rock, Ark., community organizer Randi
Romo saw a woman carrying a sign that read "no human being is
illegal." She took a photograph and sent it to an activist group,
which uploaded it to photo-sharing site Flickr.
Last August, the same image -- digitally altered so the sign
read "give me more free shit" -- appeared on a Facebook page,
Secured Borders, which called for the deportation of undocumented
immigrants. The image was liked or shared hundreds of times,
according to cached versions of the page.
This use of doctored images was a crucial and deceptively simple
technique used by Russian propagandists to spread fabricated
information during the 2016 election, one that exposes a loophole
in tech company defenses. Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google
have traps to detect misinformation, but struggle -- then and now
-- to identify falsehoods posted directly on their platforms, in
particular through pictures.
Facebook disclosed last fall that Secured Borders was one of 290
Facebook and Instagram pages created and run by Russia-backed
accounts that sought to amplify divisive social issues, including
immigration. Last week's indictment secured by special counsel
Robert Mueller cited the Secured Borders page as an example of how
Russians invented fake personas in an effort to "sow discord in the
U.S. political system."
The campaigns conducted by some of those accounts, according to
a Wall Street Journal review, often relied on images that were
doctored or taken out of context.
Algorithms designed by big technology companies are years away
from being able to accurately interpret the content of many images
and detect indications they might have been distorted or taken out
of context. Facebook says detecting even text-based content that
violates its standards is still too difficult to automate
exclusively. Facebook and Google continue to rely heavily on users
to flag posts that contain potentially false information. On
Wednesday, for example, YouTube said it mistakenly promoted a
conspiratorial video falsely accusing a teenage witness in last
week's Florida school shooting of being an actor.
Automated systems are generally set up to suppress links to fake
news articles. Falsehoods posted directly, such as within status
updates, images and videos, escape scrutiny. Moreover, the
companies are generally reluctant to remove content that is said to
be false, to avoid refereeing the truth.
Users, meanwhile, are less likely to doubt the legitimacy of
images, making distorted pictures unusually effective weapons in
misinformation campaigns, says Claire Wardle, a research fellow and
expert in social media and user-generated content at Harvard
University's Shorenstein Center.
Last week's indictment described how a Russian organization
called the Internet Research Agency issued guidance to its workers
on ratios of texts in their posts and how to use graphics and
videos.
"I created all these pictures and posts, and the Americans
believed that it was written by their people," one of the
co-conspirators emailed a relative in September, the indictment
said.
The Russian entities often added small icons known as watermarks
to the corners of their doctored photos, which branded their
impostor social-media accounts and lent an air of authenticity to
the pictures.
"In a world where we're kind of scrolling through on these small
smartphone screens, images are incredibly powerful because we're a
lot less likely to stop and think, 'does this look real?' " said
Dr. Wardle, who also leads First Draft News, a nonprofit dedicated
to fighting digital misinformation that works with tech companies
on some projects.
Facebook is working to fix its platform and prevent further
manipulation ahead of the U.S. midterm elections in November -- an
effort Facebook leaders have described as urgent. The company,
along with Google and Twitter Inc., has been under fire from
lawmakers and other critics over the handling of Russian meddling
in the presidential election.
"It's abhorrent to us that a nation-state used our platform to
wage a cyberwar intended to divide society," Facebook executive
Samidh Chakrabarti said in a blog last month, adding that the
company should have done more to prevent it. "Now we're making up
for lost time."
Facebook is refocusing to become what it calls "video first" and
expects video will dominate its news feed within a few years, which
suggests its challenges will only intensify.
The company plans to expand its program for tracking and
suppressing links to fake news articles to include doctored images
and videos, according to a Facebook spokesman. Facebook discussed
the idea earlier this month with fact-checking groups it has been
working with to check news stories, along with plans to build more
tools to help identify when photos are taken out of context.
People tend to share images and videos more than plain text.
During three months around the U.S. presidential election, tweets
that included photos were nearly twice as likely to be retweeted
than text-only tweets, according to researchers at Syracuse
University studying how information spreads on social networks.
On April 17, University of Southern California student Tiana
Lowe spotted a racist sign hanging in front of a student housing
complex near campus. On a piece of cardboard, the words "No Black
People Allowed" appeared next to a drawing of the Confederate flag
and the hashtag #MAGA, for President Donald Trump's campaign
slogan.
Ms. Lowe snapped a photo on her iPhone. In a story that day for
the campus news site, the Tab, she questioned whether the incident
was a hoax, writing that the sign had been hung by a black neighbor
who was unaffiliated with the university following a dispute with
the housing complex's residents. USC's Department of Public Safety
said the man admitted to placing the sign. (The Tab, an independent
campus news site, is partially funded by News Corp, owner of the
Journal.)
The following day, a modified version of the photo appeared on a
popular Facebook page, Blacktivist. The image was cropped, altered
and watermarked with a Blacktivist logo, and the #MAGA hashtag was
digitally removed. Information that could be used to identify the
house, such as the phone number for the property's leasing office,
was cut out.
The Blacktivist page, which last Friday's indictment said was
controlled by Russian entities, cast the significance of the photo
in a different light. The caption next to the photo made no mention
of a hoax, instead portraying it as a racist act.
"Why racial intolerance still has a place in our country?" it
read. "Racially-charged incidents continue to happen and it must
receive national attention." The Blacktivist page had more than
300,000 followers at the time.
"It had clearly been framed and repackaged as an act of white
supremacy rather than a hate-crime hoax," says Ms. Lowe. She became
aware of the reuse of her photo two days later when a conservative
college news site, the College Fix, picked up the Blacktivist
post.
Ms. Lowe says she wrote a comment on the Blacktivist post saying
the information had been taken out of context, and she tweeted a
screenshot of the post calling Blacktivist "fake news." She didn't
file a formal complaint with Facebook and didn't learn more about
Blacktivist until Facebook revealed months later it was linked to
Russia.
Tech companies can detect exact or near-exact copies of images,
videos and audio for copyright enforcement. Spotting doctored
photos or videos is a different challenge because tracking those
changes requires keeping tabs on the original image, which isn't
always available, says Krishna Bharat, who helped create Google
News and now advises and invests in startups. Running a comparative
analysis can be expensive, and there are legitimate reasons someone
might crop, touch-up or add a new element to a photo.
Around the time last summer that Secured Borders posted Ms.
Romo's photo of the mother supposedly asking for handouts, the
group also posted a meme that suggested millions of illegal
immigrants may have voted in the 2008 election. It depicted a man
who appeared to be Hispanic holding a document, implying that he
had illegally voted.
The image originated in a newscast two years earlier on Los
Angeles television station KTLA about a state program to provide
driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. A KTLA executive said he
wasn't aware that Secured Borders had used an image from the
newscast.
When misleading content is flagged, tech companies wrestle with
what to do next. Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet's YouTube say they
only remove content that violates their standards, such as
promoting hate speech, spam or distributing child pornography.
Misinformation by itself doesn't count. Doctored images or status
updates containing falsehoods can remain up if the posts don't
otherwise violate their policies.
When Facebook in September removed the 290 Russia-backed pages
on Facebook and its photo-sharing platform Instagram, it said it
did so because the accounts misrepresented their identity, not
because of the veracity of the content.
One of the misleading photos disseminated by a Russia-backed
page has remained on social media because Instagram said it doesn't
violate its content policies.
BlackMattersUS, a Russia-backed page purporting to promote the
black community, posted a misleading photo that was reshared on
Instagram as recently as January 2017. It shows a young black boy
with overlaid text saying that, because of homicide, suicide and
incarceration, "the black male is effectively dying at the rate of
an endangered species." The BlackMattersUS account was taken down
by Instagram, but because the image was shared by other legitimate
accounts, the post remained online as of mid-February.
The meme -- a photo with text on top, which is tougher for
software to read than plain text -- includes no citation of
research or statistics. The image's claim that black adult females
greatly outnumber black adult males is false, census data
indicate.
The authentic photo was part of a 2013 series on "dambe" boxers
in northern Nigeria by Nigerian photographer August Udoh, who
wasn't aware his work was used by BlackMattersUS. "The thing is,
the message itself is not even related to the image," says Mr.
Udoh. "How do you put those two together and make propaganda out of
it? It's crazy."
Ms. Romo, the photographer of the pro-immigration march, says
she discovered her photo had been manipulated by the Russia-backed
account only when she got a call from a Journal reporter. "We are
living in the greatest era of information access," she says.
"People will watch cat videos endlessly, but they won't take a
minute to ascertain whether what they are being told is true or
not."
Write to Georgia Wells at Georgia.Wells@wsj.com and Deepa
Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 22, 2018 10:59 ET (15:59 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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