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If a picture paints a thousand words, a fake picture paints just as much, or even more
Announced at the back-to-school press conference as one of the main year's innovations, Les Révélateurs of FranceTv will analyse, verify and certify amateur and viral images or videos that will then be made available to France Télévisions' editorial offices.
Bonjour ! Nous sommes les Révélateurs, cellule d'enquête visuelle de @francetv. Nous authentifions/débunkons les images/vidéos amateur virales qui circulent sur les réseaux sociaux pour toutes les rédactions du groupe. Objectif : lutter contre la désinformation visuelle. pic.twitter.com/SXMVCtDYFP
— Les Révélateurs de FranceTV (@RevelateursFTV) September 20, 2021
This unit reinforces and complements the Group's existing
fact-checking mechanisms, including Vrai ou Fake, the Lumni modules aimed at
teaching young people to be more critical about information, and France
Télévisions' participation in the Origin and C2PA projects, international
collaborations combating disinformation, misinformation and content fraud on
the Internet.
But why focus on amateur images and videos specifically ? Because they are
particularly complicated to verify (and therefore to certify), investigations
can be long tedious, and require very advanced web research skills. Journalists
can now rely on AI-based tools to verify "visual" fake news, but
these remain insufficient in many cases. Hence Les Révélateurs of FranceTv existence!
The team, composed of journalists from various editorial offices within the
Group relies on a wide range of tools and methods to debunk these modified or
manipulated images and videos. This makes it possible to determine whether they
are genuine, modified or manipulated.
Comment ? De la veille sur les réseaux sociaux (Twitter, Facebook, TG...), des techniques de vérification (ex : recherche d'image inversée...), de #factchecking et d'#OSINT (enquête en ligne). A terme, nous souhaitons réaliser des enquêtes visuelles inédites.
— Les Révélateurs de FranceTV (@RevelateursFTV) September 20, 2021
France Télévisions is keen to make the public a full-fledged player in this fight, which is why Les Révélateurs of FranceTv sees itself as a participatory unit which we can all contribute.
Misinformation, disinformation, malinformation... all different strings of the same puppet
If mass media and the powerful relays fake news, this evil that is
increasingly taking the form of a generalized global disorder against which social
networks are struggling, it is partly because "bad information" is
polymorphic.
Polymorphic, because, as mentioned above, it spreads via various
channels that are sometimes not public (Direct Messages on social networks,
transfers on personal messaging, but also word of mouth).
It is also polymorphous because of the people behind it. Indeed, while it is
undeniable that some people make a career out of producing and disseminating
fake news (often with juicy revenues - fake news websites generate an average
of 235 million dollars in advertising revenues per year!), others participate
in their creation and propagation without knowing it. In short, there are two
types of fake news‘ producers: the voluntary producers (politicians, conspiracy
theorists, manipulators, self-interested people, etc.) and the involuntary
producers (naïve, neophytes, emotional people, etc.).
Finally, the last aspect of this polymorphism of « bad information »
is its various levels. First of all, misinformation, which is the fact of
giving false information unintentionally; this is a human error. One stage
above, we can talk about disinformation: this is the use of real information to
create informational disorder. It is most often promptly directed at a specific
person. The final stage of 'misinformation' is malinformation. This is the
result of a deliberate attempt to produce and circulate false information.
A fight against disinformation that will be further strengthened in the coming months
A few months before the French presidential election, France Télévisions is stepping up its actions to fight fake news. Relying on its journalists and soliciting the collaboration of the public, this fight for true and verified informations will be further strengthened in the coming months with, in particular, a game on Franceinfo(app and website) to develop the critical sense of as many people as possible in the face of the images that flood in, as well as an ambitious partnership with the INA.
We'll tell you more soon, but in the meantime, follow Les Révélateurs of FranceTv's investigations!
To learn more about Fake news, we recommend :
*CSA' survey: La propagation des fausses informations sur les réseaux sociaux : étude de la plateforme Twitter
