Fake Images, Spread On Twitter, Fooled Media, Spooked Stock Market Briefly
from the the-deepfakes-are-evolving dept
Over the last few years, there’s been a lot of fretting among the media, politicians, and others about how “deep fakes” would have a major impact on events, with faked imagery, audio, and video creating havoc on news events and political campaigns. Back in 2019, we had published a story suggesting that people calm down a little. As we noted, similar fears had come about before, including in the early 1990s with the introduction of Photoshop. Similar predictions were made about how disastrous this would be for “truth.”
But… that never really came to be.
So it is interesting to see the story this week about a fake (most likely created using a generative AI program) photo showing what appears to be an explosion near the Pentagon. The image was fake, but it was shared by a bunch of accounts on Twitter who had paid Elon his $8 fee, enabling a blue checkmark to appear next to their name (while some people call them “verified” accounts, they’re not verified so they shouldn’t be called that). But, still, it was shared, and people believed it because it was made to look like it came from Bloomberg News.
The image, which bears all the hallmarks of being generated by artificial intelligence, was shared by numerous verified accounts with blue check marks, including one that falsely claimed it was associated with Bloomberg News.
“Large explosion near the Pentagon complex in Washington DC. – initial report,” the account posted, along with an image purporting to show black smoke rising near a large building.
And, from there, some in the media reported it as real:
The false reports of the explosion also made their way to air on a major Indian television network. Republic TV reported that an explosion had taken place, showing the fake image on its air and citing reports from the Russian news outlet RT. It later retracted the report when it became clear the incident had not taken place.
And… from there, it impacted the stock market:
In the moments after the image began circulating on Twitter, the US stock market took a noticeable dip. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell about 80 points between 10:06 a.m. and 10:10 a.m., fully recovering by 10:13 a.m. Similarly, the broader S&P 500 went from up 0.02% at 10:06 a.m. to down 0.15% at 10:09 a.m.. By 10:11 a.m., the index was positive again.
The fact that it was debunked and the stock market recovered quickly again suggests that the “threat” of faked content is still at least somewhat limited. But, in those five minutes, it’s likely that some people might have lost a lot of money (and others may have made lots of money). So it did have an impact.
However, it does seem notable that this is the first story I can recall of such a faked image actually having such an impact, unlike the predictions from years ago that this would be a regular occurrence. Now, it may come to pass that this happens more often, but, if anything, this seems to reinforce our story from a few years ago that it’s pretty difficult to pull off a full scale faking that has any real impact.
It is still notable that the main vector that made it possible for this image to have even the slight (and temporary) effect that it had was Musk’s ridiculous decision to turn “verification” into a profit center/asshole signaling system, rather than an actual verification plan. That is still allowing malicious actors to abuse this system to try to pretend to be more legitimate. And that was a key piece to the puzzle here. Without that faux “verification” it seems unlikely that any of this would have worked.
Indeed, Bloomberg’s own report of the story, notes that the image was actually first posted to Facebook, but didn’t get much traction until “verified” Twitter accounts tweeted it, including conspiracy theory nonsense peddler ZeroHedge and a fake “Bloomberg News” feed:
The fake photo, which first appeared on Facebook, showed a large plume of smoke that a Facebook user claimed was near the US military headquarters in Virginia.
It soon spread on Twitter accounts that reach millions of followers, including the Russian state-controlled news network RT and the financial news site ZeroHedge, a participant in the social-media company’s new Twitter Blue verification system.
Filed Under: deep fakes, elon musk, impact, impersonation, truth, twitter blue, verification
Companies: twitter