Disinformation-proof democracies

“Disinformation, lies, hoaxes, propaganda, false news are legion”, warned recently the French National Library (Bibliothèque nationale de France). This French institution organized a one-day Disinformation-proof democracies conference on the 20th of March 2019 in Paris.

The event was part of the Press at school week on information literacy. The whole video of the conference is available on YouTube (in French).

We presented WeVerify concepts at this conference, with examples of fake still images and videos. Then, we explained how to debunk them by using our verification plugin.

Furthermore, we explained how similarity search remains effective to retrieve the original footage used to build such a “deep fake” video.

With the example of a famous deep fake of Donald Trump made by a Belgium political party, we showcased how it is possible to retrieve the original images used to make the fake.

Those images come from a previous Whitehouse press conference. The US president announced at that time air strikes against Syria because of the use of chemical weapons against civilians by the Al-Assad regime.

We finished the presentation of WeVerify by talking about our project of database of known fakes. Among the examples, we presented the so-called “green picture” of Bin Laden death. Despite being a known fake, it still confuses search engines. Even if it is a manipulated keyframe of Ridley Scott’s movie Black Hawk Down.