Videos Never Lie
I saw it in the TV news – it looked real!
I think that TV news have had a creative view on truth for a long time, so maybe it isn’t a big deal, the thing they do now.
And maybe they are themselves victims, being pulled off by creative crooks or manipulative government agencies.
But the end result is that they show pictures and videos that are fake. And they build stories around those, and claim a lot of things that most of their viewers cannot verify – it’s a matter of believing it or not, and often, people do believe it.
Manipulating video is possible in many more ways than you can think of.
By tradition, it’s a matter of what’s being shown and what’s not. For instance, showing videos from inside a demonstrating crowd that is being attacked by the police with tear gas or rubber bullets, despite that we see no attempts by the crowd to do anything else than hold up signs and sing protest songs. Why is that evil police squad shooting at them?
Of course, there could be other activities going on than you see on the video. Maybe some other people, somewhere else in the crowd, not in the video, are throwing Molotov cocktails against the police.
What if you would see the video from inside the police squad instead? Maybe it would show how the police is being attacked but does nothing in return, just taking cobblestones and bottles and all kinds of other stuff being thrown at them. You may even hear a commander shouting “retreat”!
If you see both videos, you’ll be in doubt about what’s happening, but TV often has just one of them and gives you that as proof of what happened. Which, of course, isn’t proving anything, as the video shows only one side of the truth, at best, but most often not even that, only a small glimpse of the whole event – other things could have happened before, and after, and somewhere else.
Another kind of manipulation is to show videos from a different event but, by words, connecting them to the event spoken about. “10,000 demonstrators were throwing Molotov cocktails at the police this afternoon” – but they didn’t; the videos were from another place, another time.
And yet another way of manipulation, much spoken about these days, is the AI manipulated videos that can show almost anything, including people being killed or something exploding, without anything ever happening in real life.
Living in such a universe of manipulation will of course make some people doubt about what they are seeing, perhaps not trusting anything they see on TV. And to counter that, yet another manipulation method has been created, even more clever than the rest: The simple claim that whatever has been shown was, indeed, a manipulation, “but here is what really happened”.
TV is important, because more than half of people in the USA get their news from the TV news programs. That’s their reality. In other parts of the world, the percentage is smaller, with people spreading their news intake to several sources, but still, much of what they hear and see can be manipulated just the same – be it on YouTube, some other social media, or in discussion forums.
TV offers a centralized distribution of news, somewhat guaranteeing that it will not be further manipulated after they send it out. But the manipulation that happened before they got the pictures, or the one they added themselves, knowingly or not, for instance when trying to match information from different sources into one common, to them plausible, story – it is being distributed just the same.
Social media may see many versions of the same story, of which some are manipulated and others aren’t, but how can you know what is true?
A suggestion, from my side, is that you can try looking at the videos you see and consider who might benefit from faking them – if you can think of some who can, then there is a chance that it has happened. Or, if you can think of some who could benefit from claiming that videos are fake, even if they aren’t, there is a chance that this happened.
In any case, whatever you see, will at best show a small fraction of a bigger reality, about which you cannot conclude much on the basis of the videos you see.
And that thought should open up your mind for reconsidering everything you have ever seen or heard in your life:
The famous Moon landing, which “you saw with your own eyes” on TV?
The limited and somewhat ridiculous military parade for Donald Trump?
The Nazi salutes by Elon Musk?
And even the many historical videos of dead people in concentration camps and elsewhere.
I am not saying that all of this was fake and pure manipulation. But I am saying that these things, along with all other things you see on TV, can be manipulated in any direction, and maybe some of it was. It can be made worse, or better, than the reality, and there can be made different versions with contradictory claims. Often, you may combine additional written or oral claims with what you see, perhaps add thoughts based on your own imagination, thereby constructing your own, somewhat skewed, memory of it all.
Maybe the best you can do, to tune your sense of the world closer in on the real world, is to seek additional information about anything that moves you? Not just take the first “evidence” for proof, but seek more, and from different sources. It can be difficult to get such and develop a qualified opinion, as you never know what can be trusted and what not, but you can train yourself in ways of seeking alternative input.
If you will even try to keep track of where all the information comes from, such as by listing it in a copybook, along with the reasoning you make to draw a conclusion on it, you’ll be a lot better off than most people today, who gladly let themselves manipulate.
Factoids
It's not about right or wrong, it's about thinking – capturing typical thoughts and turning them around, inside out, to see what they're made of
If crime novels have taught me anything is that it's all about motive. However, even though we all know who won the space race, I'm pretty sure that doesn't make the moon landing fake. It's an interesting approach to critical thinking, though.