Fake news is flooding the web and swarming in our private messaging and e-mail inboxes. As a consequence of the public’s growing distrust of the mass media, it is on average, 35% more viral, massively disseminated and relayed. More than a trend it is a real groundswell that is spreading far and wide. This information disorder spares no subject, no medium and no form of communication. Les Révélateurs of FranceTV, France Télévisions’ new image and video fact-checking unit, aims to fight against a particularly pernicious form of this disinformation.
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.
Les Révélateurs of FranceTv will put amateur images into the revealing bath which will show the authentic or hidden meaning of a share on messaging or social networks.
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.
Francetv wants to be able to provide better information thanks to witnesses, people who are attentive to what is happening around them, while being as accurate as possible in what is shown on our channels. This is why the verification of images posted on the web is essential.
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 :
- Vrai ou Fake investigations
- Our journalists’Twitter accounts:
- The recent investigation by Compléments d'enquête: Fake news, the money machine
- An article by Méta-Média on censorship, disinformation and the resistance of Chinese Internet users in the era of COVID-19:
*CSA' survey: La propagation des fausses informations sur les réseaux sociaux : étude de la plateforme Twitter
