InVID project at Futur en Seine digital festival in Paris

InVID project at Futur en Seine digital festival in Paris

The early prototypes of InVID will be exposed at the Futur en Seine digital festival in Paris, at the Grande halle de la Villette (practical info available here), from the 8th to the 10th of June, where professionals and the public will be able to see and test how journalists can debunk fake videos on social networks with examples taken from recent breaking and social media emerging news.

Partner AFP will demo the InVID Discovery platform (a.k.a. the InVID Multimodal Analytics Dashboard), the InVID Verification Application and an InVID browser plugin: a verification toolbox soon to be released in open source.

The browser plugin, tested over the last few weeks by the video and social media team at AFP, allows to quickly debunk a fake video by extracting thumbnails from the corresponding web platform, or by fragmenting the video into keyframes (see screenshot bellow) before searching those images on a reverse image search engine like Google Images to retrieve previous copies of the same video if any available. And this works for Facebook, Youtube, Twitter or any video file the journalist chooses to upload to InVID platform.

InVID-keyframes

Recently when the news of a Manila resort Casino in Philippines being attacked on 1st of June 2017 evening broke, a fake video (first screenshot bellow)  started to circulate on Twitter, claiming to be a raw footage of the attack from a CCTV camera while as debunk by an AFP social media journalist, it was a copy of previous videos on another attack perpetrated at a hotel in Suriname at the end of December 2011 (second screenshot bellow).

Fake video about a robbery take place in a casino in Manila

Fake video claiming to show a robbery at a Manila resort Casino on 1th of June 2017.

The real video

The original video showing an attack at the Savanah hotel in Suriname on 27th-28th of December 2011.