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False captioning seems to be too easy to trace today with google image search and the general availability of photo materials in the Internet. For example in t

by dimitar 12y ago

False captioning seems to be too easy to trace today with google image search and the general availability of photo materials in the Internet. For example in the current conflict in Ukraine, Russian media has employed a lot of fakery, but the overwhelming majority of the times they were caught, they used false captioning. Today it seems that no one will believe a clumsy photoshot jobs, however false captioning is potent as ever. For examples see these sources: http://globalvoicesonline.org/2014/03/05/ukraines-activists-debunk-russian-myths-on-crimea/ http://globalvoicesonline.org/2014/03/05/ukraines-activists-... http://www.stopfake.org/en/ http://www.stopfake.org/en/

jqm 12y ago
From the article.. "Communists do not follow the rules when it comes to captions" (For some reason this line in the article almost doubled me over with laughter. I guess it's hard to remember how bad the red scare actually was, but the repeat blanket statements about "communists" just struck me as funny.)
- dimitar 12y ago
  While biased, it is not unfair; There was only a limited number of Soviet publications and they were official official organs of either the Communist party or the government (obviously 100% communist party members). So it was that simple. Of course, it would be unfair to communists living in democracies, since they often expressed their own personal views and a variety of party lines differing from the one in the USSR.
- charlieh 12y ago
  They murdered 100 million people, and are continuing to murder people to this day. Yeah, really funny.
- reality_czech 12y ago
  1969 was not anywhere near the "red scare" which was in the early 1950s. Anyone living in 1969 would have been well aware of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, in which a nuclear war almost broke out, and the USSR's brutal invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush the pro-democracy protests there. Pretty much the opposite of "funy." Anyone reading this document would have known full well that "communists" in this context meant government officials of the USSR, North Korea, or China. All of those regimes had (and two still do) highly censored presses that were indeed not "careful with captions" -- or the lives of people who dared to expose the truth about the government in general.
  - jqm 12y ago
    Please settle down my friend. I'm not suggesting the Russians didn't abuse the Czechs. It's just the blanket statements and rhetoric (yes, it is rhetoric) used in the article strike me as funny
    - charlieh 12y ago
      Stalin was the worst mass murderer in human history, with Mao not far behind. Between them they enslaved almost all of Asia and half of Europe, with no sign that they were content to stop there. They had a nuclear gun pointed at the West's head for several decades. But you think the "rhetoric" was "funny". Just paranoia, no doubt. I've encountered this attitude before (generally, though not exclusively, among those who are too young to remember the heydey of the Marxist slave state), but never quite understood it. So, tell us: just what more could they have done that would have made the threat serious?
    - reality_czech 12y ago
      Do you also read the Diary of Anne Frank and then post "LOL this girl really thought the nazis were after her haha" to Facebook? Because that is how you are coming across here.
- prof_hobart 12y ago
  It's interesting that an article about misreporting in the media is doing such a good job of misreporting (or at least being rather selective in its presentation of facts) itself. The reality is that all media My single favourite bit of misreporting came from the UK's Sky News back in 2000, during the anti-globalisation protests in Prague. They had a reporter live in Prague talking about the protests and stating that the whole of the centre the city was in lockdown as the citizens were barricading themselves against the protesters. I may well have believed him if I hadn't been watching it sat in a coffee house in the centre of Prague at the time.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- argonaut 12y ago
  > Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - jqm 12y ago
    I don't think there is anything wrong with pointing out people's petty behavior. Petty people who don't take the time to make an argument or don't have one to make might feel differently.
    - argonaut 12y ago
      Downvoters have no responsibility to justify their actions. The guidelines certainly don't say justification is necessary.
      - jqm 12y ago
        They certainly don't. And the rules don't say they have to. That is the definition of pettiness.
ZoF 12y ago
I didn't down-vote you(in fact I don't have the karma to do so), but I think the reason you were down-voted is because the intent of your statement is unclear. What I think you're trying to say is that while false captioning _should be_(and indeed _is_) easy to trace(given modern tools), it is still more prolific and successful(potent) than you would have expected. That said, your post reads like a train of thought, not an opinion.... You offer forth some conjecture, give an example, refute it, and then don't formally state your thoughts on the matter. It leaves us, as readers, nothing to respond to really... Let me give you an example. I'm going to describe the same thing two ways. a.)Bank robberies seem to be easy to stop today, with the multitude of security systems in place and general improved response time of law enforcement. For example, in the last decade multiple bank robberies were attempted and the overwhelming majority of them were foiled. It seems that no bank would be susceptible to a robbery, however robberies are as potent as ever. Check out these random sources I have relating to isolated cases of robberies [0][1] [0]-source [1]-source b.) It's surprising to see that bank robberies are so potent given the multitude of security systems in place, as well as the improved response time of law enforcement. It seems that banks wouldn't be susceptible to robberies given the tools they have at hand, yet we have evidence of it happening regularly, I wonder why that is. TLDR/In Short: You're offering us 'conjecture', that is; you're giving us your interpretation of how easy you think false caption detection should be(for the average pleb like myself), but you're failing to tell us why you have that opinion and then you exacerbate the situation by disagreeing with yourself.
- dimitar 12y ago
  Point taken, it does look like a train of thought. It does seem like I'm disagreeing with my self! Technically I probably am. Let me start over: * False captioning (FC) is easy to spot if you compare sources. * Clumsy Photoshoping is too apparent today, at least for the internet crowd. Its plain for the eye to see, so to speak. * While easily "debunked", for FC you have to read blogs or other media. Good photoshop jobs take a lot of effort and talent, FC is easy to do. * Things were definitively different just 15 years ago. Viewers expected lower resolutions and photoshopping was that prevalent. * In the end of the day FC seems to be preferred form of deception ("fakery"),
wazoox 12y ago
Similar blatant fakery has been spotted in the NYTimes, pretending that different men where the same Russian Special Force soldiers by using low res imagery, while the hi-res version was quite easy to find on the net and clearly showed them to be different people.

by dimitar 12y ago

jqm 12y ago

From the article.. "Communists do not follow the rules when it comes to captions" (For some reason this line in the article almost doubled me over with laughter. I guess it's hard to remember how bad the red scare actually was, but the repeat blanket statements about "communists" just struck me as funny.)

dimitar 12y ago
While biased, it is not unfair; There was only a limited number of Soviet publications and they were official official organs of either the Communist party or the government (obviously 100% communist party members). So it was that simple. Of course, it would be unfair to communists living in democracies, since they often expressed their own personal views and a variety of party lines differing from the one in the USSR.
charlieh 12y ago
They murdered 100 million people, and are continuing to murder people to this day. Yeah, really funny.
reality_czech 12y ago
1969 was not anywhere near the "red scare" which was in the early 1950s. Anyone living in 1969 would have been well aware of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, in which a nuclear war almost broke out, and the USSR's brutal invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush the pro-democracy protests there. Pretty much the opposite of "funy." Anyone reading this document would have known full well that "communists" in this context meant government officials of the USSR, North Korea, or China. All of those regimes had (and two still do) highly censored presses that were indeed not "careful with captions" -- or the lives of people who dared to expose the truth about the government in general.
- jqm 12y ago
  Please settle down my friend. I'm not suggesting the Russians didn't abuse the Czechs. It's just the blanket statements and rhetoric (yes, it is rhetoric) used in the article strike me as funny
  - charlieh 12y ago
    Stalin was the worst mass murderer in human history, with Mao not far behind. Between them they enslaved almost all of Asia and half of Europe, with no sign that they were content to stop there. They had a nuclear gun pointed at the West's head for several decades. But you think the "rhetoric" was "funny". Just paranoia, no doubt. I've encountered this attitude before (generally, though not exclusively, among those who are too young to remember the heydey of the Marxist slave state), but never quite understood it. So, tell us: just what more could they have done that would have made the threat serious?
  - reality_czech 12y ago
    Do you also read the Diary of Anne Frank and then post "LOL this girl really thought the nazis were after her haha" to Facebook? Because that is how you are coming across here.
prof_hobart 12y ago
It's interesting that an article about misreporting in the media is doing such a good job of misreporting (or at least being rather selective in its presentation of facts) itself. The reality is that all media My single favourite bit of misreporting came from the UK's Sky News back in 2000, during the anti-globalisation protests in Prague. They had a reporter live in Prague talking about the protests and stating that the whole of the centre the city was in lockdown as the citizens were barricading themselves against the protesters. I may well have believed him if I hadn't been watching it sat in a coffee house in the centre of Prague at the time.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

argonaut 12y ago
> Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jqm 12y ago
  I don't think there is anything wrong with pointing out people's petty behavior. Petty people who don't take the time to make an argument or don't have one to make might feel differently.
  - argonaut 12y ago
    Downvoters have no responsibility to justify their actions. The guidelines certainly don't say justification is necessary.
    - jqm 12y ago
      They certainly don't. And the rules don't say they have to. That is the definition of pettiness.

ZoF 12y ago

I didn't down-vote you(in fact I don't have the karma to do so), but I think the reason you were down-voted is because the intent of your statement is unclear. What I think you're trying to say is that while false captioning _should be_(and indeed _is_) easy to trace(given modern tools), it is still more prolific and successful(potent) than you would have expected. That said, your post reads like a train of thought, not an opinion.... You offer forth some conjecture, give an example, refute it, and then don't formally state your thoughts on the matter. It leaves us, as readers, nothing to respond to really... Let me give you an example. I'm going to describe the same thing two ways. a.)Bank robberies seem to be easy to stop today, with the multitude of security systems in place and general improved response time of law enforcement. For example, in the last decade multiple bank robberies were attempted and the overwhelming majority of them were foiled. It seems that no bank would be susceptible to a robbery, however robberies are as potent as ever. Check out these random sources I have relating to isolated cases of robberies [0][1] [0]-source [1]-source b.) It's surprising to see that bank robberies are so potent given the multitude of security systems in place, as well as the improved response time of law enforcement. It seems that banks wouldn't be susceptible to robberies given the tools they have at hand, yet we have evidence of it happening regularly, I wonder why that is. TLDR/In Short: You're offering us 'conjecture', that is; you're giving us your interpretation of how easy you think false caption detection should be(for the average pleb like myself), but you're failing to tell us why you have that opinion and then you exacerbate the situation by disagreeing with yourself.

dimitar 12y ago
Point taken, it does look like a train of thought. It does seem like I'm disagreeing with my self! Technically I probably am. Let me start over: * False captioning (FC) is easy to spot if you compare sources. * Clumsy Photoshoping is too apparent today, at least for the internet crowd. Its plain for the eye to see, so to speak. * While easily "debunked", for FC you have to read blogs or other media. Good photoshop jobs take a lot of effort and talent, FC is easy to do. * Things were definitively different just 15 years ago. Viewers expected lower resolutions and photoshopping was that prevalent. * In the end of the day FC seems to be preferred form of deception ("fakery"),

wazoox 12y ago

Similar blatant fakery has been spotted in the NYTimes, pretending that different men where the same Russian Special Force soldiers by using low res imagery, while the hi-res version was quite easy to find on the net and clearly showed them to be different people.