Tag Archive: InVID verification tools

The InVID Verification tools at EJTA 2018

The InVID Verification tools at EJTA 2018

The InVID technologies for newsworthy content discovery and verification were presented by the CERTH team at the EJTA Teacher’s Conference 2018, that took place in Thessaloniki, Greece, on 18-19 of October 2018. The different components of the InVID Verification Plugin for online debunking of fake videos, were demonstrated during a hands-on session.

This session started by a short introductory presentation made by Dr. Vasileios Mezaris (the InVID Project Co-ordinator). This presentation aimed to discuss the motivation behind the project (i.e. the ever-growing need for quickly identifying and stopping the spread of fake news!), the goals of the project and the integrated technologies that have been developed, to assisting journalists and media professionals in collecting, discovering and verifying newsworthy user-generated content.

The participants of this session, more than 15 academics and teachers from Schools of Mass Media and Journalism from European universities, had the opportunity to follow a step-by-step procedure for installing the plugin, and using it in a number of fake news debunking examples, based on the different verification components of the plugin.

The collected feedback regarding the functionality of the InVID Verification Plugin was highly possitive, while the demonstrated examples in comparison with the free access to the InVID plugin were highly valued as a source that will enable the participants to enrich their courses with some real-life scenarios of fake news debunking using a state-of-the-art video verification technology.

Academics and teachers from Schools of Journalism arround Europe, being presented the verification functionalities of the InVID plugin.

Dr. Zampoglou (CERTH) demonstrating the analysis capabilities of the image forensic component that is integrated into the InVID plugin.

 

October 17, 2018 Events, News, , , , Read more >

InVID at MIL meeting on social media detection and verification

InVID at MIL meeting on social media detection and verification

The InVID project and the developed technologies for newsworthy media collection and verification, were presented on a meeting focusing on tools for detection and verification of videos shared on social networks, that was co-organized by CERTH/InVID and the Media Informatics Lab of the Journalism & Mass Media Dept. of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, on Thursday 14th of December 2017.

An audience (approx. 80 people), comprised by professors, academics and students of the Journalism & Mass Media Dept, journalists and media verification experts, was initially informed about the InVID project by the project co-ordinator Dr. Vasileios Mezaris, who introduced the project’s motivation, goals, overall concept and integrated technologies for newsworthy media collection and verification.

Following, Mr. Evlampios Apostolidis from CERTH-ITI, gave a talk on fake news that rely on video reuse and the way that InVID handles such fakes. In particular, he presented the developed web application for video fragmentation and reverse keyframe search, that assists journalists to perform reverse video search at the fragment-level, and detect previously published versions of the same video online.

Then, Dr. Symeon Papadopoulos from CERTH-ITI, discussed methods for automated detection of fake posts on social media and highlighted the efficiency and functionality of an InVID tool (which was based on one of the outcomes of the Reveal EU-funded project) for contextual analysis. This tool is capable to identify and evaluate verification-related content, and provide clues about the trustworthiness of a social media item to the journalists.

Subsequently, Dr. Markos Zampoglou from CERTH-ITI, presented the developed tools for image forensic analysis. Dr. Zampoglou described, with the help of some representative examples, different types of image tampering, explained the InVID apprach to identidy many of them, and outlined the challenges of this task, the limitations of existing approaches as well as some future directions.

Finally, Mr. Denis Teyssou from AFP, joined the meeting via Google Hangouts and gave a nice presentation about the verification functionalities of the developed plugin for fake news video debunking.

Details about the event (in Greek) are available at: http://pacific.jour.auth.gr/?p=2896

The program of the event (in Greek) is available at: http://pacific.jour.auth.gr/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/program_InVid.pdf

December 15, 2017 Events, News, , , , , , , , Read more >

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.

June 9, 2017 Events, News, , , , Read more >

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.

June 8, 2017 Events, News, , , Read more >