Used to trust video evidence in news reports without a second thought

I saw a clip during the 2020 protests in Portland that showed a police officer shoving a guy. Turned out a week later it was two different videos spliced together, totally fake. Now I spend like 10 minutes checking the source, lighting shadows, and skin edges before I believe anything. Has anyone else caught themselves fact checking a random video from a friend's share?

3 comments

3 Comments

rileygarcia1mo ago

Used to trust video evidence in news reports without a second thought" and now you're spending ten minutes checking shadows on a friend's cat video? That's kind of the problem, honestly. You're so scared of being fooled that you've started seeing fakes everywhere, even when the original clip was probably real and just got taken out of context for a day. The Portland thing was a hoax, sure, but most video evidence that makes it into news reports is vetted by people who do this for a living, not some random guy with a phone and a grudge. If you spend that much energy on every little share, you're just gonna burn yourself out and miss the stuff that actually matters.

riverh491mo ago

A little skepticism isn't burnout material, it's just common sense now. You can't just handwave the Portland hoax like it's some rare glitch when that kind of thing happens more often than people want to admit. The people "vetting" this stuff are often just editors with deadlines who trust the same sources that got burned before. Spending ten minutes watching shadows on a cat video might seem nitpicky, but it's the same skill you need to spot a real doctored news clip before it blows up. Burning out only happens if you treat every piece of media like a conspiracy, not if you take a second to question what's in front of your face. The stuff that matters doesn't get missed when you're paying attention, it gets buried when everyone assumes someone else already checked.

drew_hart41mo ago

What about the Portland thing made it obvious it was a hoax from the start?