My colleagues and I recently studie how people assess the credibility of images that illustrate online Spotting a fake image article Spotting a fake images and what factors are considere in this assessment. We found that you are much less likely to be wrong if you are familiar with the internet, digital photography, and online media platforms —what academics call “digital media literacy . ”

Who is foole by fake photos?

If they disagree with something the image shows, they will be more likely to consider lbank database it false and, conversely, more likely to believe it is true if they agree with what they saw.

Additionally, we want to know if a person’s level of familiarity with tools and techniques that allow users to manipulate images and generate fake ones play a role in their judgment. These methods have advanced much more rapidly in recent years than technologies capable of detecting digital manipulation.

Until image verifiers catch up , the risks and dangers of malicious actors using fake images to influence public opinion or cause emotional distress remain high . Last month, during the unrest surrounding Indonesia’s elections, a man deliberately spread a fake image on social media to stir up anti-Chinese sentiment among the public.

Our research aime to better understand how people make decisions about the authenticity of these images online.

Test fake images

For our study, we create six fake photos on various topics, including national and international politics, scientific discoveries, natural disasters, and social issues. We then create 28 mockups showing how each of these photos might appear online, as share on Facebook or publishe on the New York Times website.

Each mockup feature a fake image accompanie by a brief text description of its contents and some contextual clues and elements , such as where the photo was supposedly taken, information about its source and whether anyone had reshard it – as well as the number of likes or other forms of interaction.

All images and the text and information appearing alongside them were fabrications – including  Spotting a fake image the two at the top of this article.

We used only fake images to avoid the possibility that participants in our study had already encountere the original image. Our research did not address a related problem calle “misattribution,” in which a real image is presentedin an unrelate context or with false information .

We recruite 3,476 participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk , all of whom were at types of email marketing campaigns Spotting a fake imageleast 18 years old and live in the United States.

Each participant first answere a randomly ordere set of questions regarding their internet skills, experience with digital imaging, and attitudes toward various sociopolitical issues. They were then presente with a formatte image in a randomly selecte mockup and aske to look closely at the image and assess its credibility.

The context did not help

We found that participants’ judgments of image credibility did not vary depending on context . We place a photo of a collapse bridge in a Facebook post share by only four people. They judge it to be fake the same way when the image illustrate an article on the New York Times website .

Instead, the main factors that determine whether a person could correctly perceive an image as fake were relate to their level of experience with the internet and digital photography . People familiar with social media and digital imaging tools were more skeptical about the authenticity of the images and less likely to rate them as real.

We also found that existing beliefs and opinions significantly influence sale lead how they judge the credibility of images. For example, when a person disagree with the premise of the photo they were shown, they were more likely to Spotting a fake image believe it was a fake image. This finding is consistent with studies showing what’s calle “confirmation bias,” or the tendency for people to believe information is real or true if it matches what they already believe.  

Confirmation bias could help explain why misinformation spreads so easily online Spotting a fake image  – when people encounter something that confirms their point of view, they are more likely to share it online with their communities.