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Verified By BOOM 43
🚨Hate Mongers Now Have Blue-Tick on Twitter
Browser View | April 15, 2023 | Subscribe
👋 Hey there! Have you noticed how the internet is flooded with fake AI-generated images? It's like we're living in an artificial world! All it takes is one prompt, and boom! You've got a fake image. On this week's edition of Verified by BOOM, learn more about this crazy phenomenon. Let's dive in!
🔖 You might have seen several hyper realistic photos of public personalities like Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Russian President Vladimir Putin, among others. Oh wait, hyper-realistic and AI-generated*.
In last week's edition, I gave you some tips on how to identify whether it's an AI-generated image or not. Now, I am going to discuss a tool which is being increasingly used to create these fake images—Midjourney.
All you have to do is: give a prompt and it creates that particular image. Yes, it's that simple!
Beware when you see something which is too good to be true or something that is too bad to be true!
TL;DR: Stop. Verify. Share.
📢 Event Alert
On 18 April, the Software Freedom law Center (SFLC) is organising panel discussions on Software Patents and Digital India Act at the India International Centre, New Delhi.
🤥 Misinformation Last Month
The month of March saw a significant number of false claims around assaults on Bihari migrants in Tamil Nadu—making it the most prominent topic, accounting for 15% of all the claims fact-checked by BOOM last month.
BOOM's Debraj Sarkar analysed the 100 fact-checks that we published in three different languages (English, Hindi and Bangla) and found out that majority of the false claims were ‘Political’, accounting for 35% of the total data set, followed by Alarmist and International claims, comprising 17% and 15% of the total claims.
Read the full report to know the detailed analysis.
🤥 Misinformation This Week
BOOM published a total of 26 fact-checks this week. AI-generated images are becoming increasingly commonplace in the false information ecosystem of the country. This week, AI-generated images targeted personalities like PM Modi, Vladimir Putin, and Julian Assange.
Read our Twitter thread to know the detailed analysis by Debraj Sarkar.
#BOOMWeeklyReport | BOOM published a total of 26 fact-checks this week. Of these 26 unique claims that we investigated, 17 were found to be in the form of images while the rest (9) were in the form of videos. (1/n)
#BOOMFactCheck
— BOOM Live (@boomlive_in)
9:52 AM • Apr 14, 2023
👹Obscurity To 'Verified': Trolls, Hate-Mongers Now Have Twitter's Blue Tick
🔖 A blue tick next to your Twitter account was once considered a prized asset - a symbol of verification and authenticity - given to only those who reached a certain position of prominence. Now, conspiracy theorists, trolls, misogynists, hate-mongers, and other unverified troublemakers are also sporting a blue tick - all for $8.
This begs the question - who are these blue tick subscribers in India, who shall soon get priority on your Twitter feed? And what will Twitter look like once that happens? Read Archis Chowdhury's detailed report.
📜 Mughals and Gandhi: Will Removing History Create More Misinformation?
🔖 Last week, news reports said that the National Council for Education Research and Training (NCERT) has changed textbooks and removed entire topics related to the Mughals and references to the assassination of Gandhi.
Will these changes lead to more misinformation? BOOM's Kaisar Andrabi spoke to historians, educationists and scholars to find out.
🔖 A 110-year-old Madrassa in Bihar Sharif was set on fire by a mob on Ram Navami. The nearby markets were robbed, buses and cars were set on fire and the masjid was damaged. Local Muslims were hit by stone, bricks and sticks and were forced to say "Jai Shri Ram". Watch this ground report by Meer Faisal and Ubair Ul Hameed.
🔖 The Congress party recently shared a news report by non-profit website Adani Watch to claim that Chang Chien-Ting, an associate of the Adani Group, is a Chinese national.
But, is he a Chinese national? Read this fact-check by Archis Chowdhury to find out.
🔖 In the latest trend of fake hyper-realistic AI-generated images, comes a photo of Prime Minister Narendra Modi purporting to show him peering through a microscope.
Well, it has been created using generative-AI tool Midjourney.
🅱️ Recommends
📖 This week's recommendation is: Yes, Deepfakes can make people believe in Misinformation - but no more than less hyped ways of lying by Joshua Benton.
This article is one of the many insightful works on the effects of deepfakes on the populace. In this, it is studied how different the confounding impact of deepfakes is compared to more generic types of false information generation and the authors come to the conclusion that deepfakes are capable of misleading the public, but not more so than the more conventional forms of false information types we have encountered in the past.
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Verified By Boom is written by Divya Chandra, edited by Adrija Bose
and designed by H Shiva Roy Chowdhury.
If you have suggestions about this newsletter or want us to conduct workshops on specific topics, drop us a line at 👉 [email protected] and we will get back to you in a jiffy. Thanks for reading. See you next week.👋
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