Doctor Mike

And it was not.

It was a real image of a, you know, of a war, you know, a conflict moment.

And when you have the false negatives or the false positives, it just creates this sort of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and people don't trust what they see with their eyes.

And this, unfortunately, is the world that we are moving into.

Even for those of us who do this professionally, whenever I'm looking at something and trying to do an authentication, I'm usually in touch with multiple people in a back channel, right?

Hey guys, have you seen this thing?

What do you think it is?

There's like four or five of us talking.

There are some people who are really experts in authentication.

Hani Farid at Berkeley is one person who comes to mind.

We're like, that is kind of the thing he does.

There are people at social media platforms who have additional visibility into the accounts that are disseminating the content, right?

Because that's also a signal.

Did these accounts just spring up out of nowhere?

Do they appear to have changed hands?

Did they suddenly move from posting in one country to posting in another country?

Only the platforms have visibility into that.

You or I don't, even as a researcher on the outside, I don't have visibility into that.

Um, so there's just, it's really a very collaborative investigative process when people are looking at and trying to sort these things out.

That's the unfortunate reality of it.