Monthly Archive: June 2017

InVID at Futur en Seine: a summary

InVID at Futur en Seine: a summary

More than 300 persons, including France recently appointed minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, Mrs Frédérique Vidal attended at Paris Futur en Seine digital festival (8-10 of June) demos of InVID prototypes aiming to debunk fake videos.

Paris Mayor deputy in charge of economic development, Jean-Louis Missika was also among the personalities who attended the demos (on the right of the main picture above), with InVID tools being applied on «real life» use cases like some of the fake news debunked during the CrossCheck operation (see for example this one) run by a bunch of French mainstream media during the recent presidential election. InVID tools are aimed to help journalists to verify newsworthy videos on social networks.

InVID demos attracted dozen of journalists, including well-known teams of «verifiers» like the Décodeurs of the French daily Le Monde, The Observers of France 24 broadcaster and also journalists from France-Télévisions and FranceInfo and TF1 TV channels. Other attendees included startupers, academics, researchers, teachers and media educators as well as officials of several French ministries.

Feedback on InVID demos was very good and encouraging, as disinformation on social networks has become a deep concern in France, like in other Western countries.

French minister attends InVID demo

French minister attend InVID demo

The newly appointed French minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, Mrs Frédérique Vidal, visited on Thursday June 8th the InVID booth at Futur en Seine Digital Festival 2017 (see central image above) where she was shown prototypes aiming to debunk fake videos. In particular, Mrs Vidal was shown how the fragmentation service, extracting relevant keyframes from a video, could help to debunk quickly a viral video shared during the French presidential elections by extremists xenophobic Facebook pages, claiming that a migrant seeking free universal healthcare assaulted a nurse and other employees in a public hospital.

The image reverse search demonstrated in a few clicks that the video was in fact taken one month earlier in Novgorod, Russia, and was showing a drunk man hitting there the hospital employees. Once the video was debunked within the CrossCheck initiative led by First Draft News and Google News Lab on the French election (check the report about the debunking here), it was removed from Facebook but after being seen more than seven millions times.

The image reverse search demonstrated in a few clicks that the video was in fact taken one month earlier in Novgorod, Russia, and was showing a drunk man hitting there the hospital employees. Once the video was debunked within the CrossCheck initiative led by First Draft News and Google News Lab on the French election (check the report about the debunking here), it was removed from Facebook but after being seen more than seven millions times.

With the help of the video fragmentation and reverse keyframe search tool was shown that the video was in fact taken one month earlier in Novgorod, Russia, presenting a drunk man hitting the hospital employees.

The recent presidential election raised deep concern in France about the fake news spreading on social networks. French president Emmanuel Macron himself complained shortly before his victory that «the social networks hurt me a lot» through attacks from hardliners extremists.

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.