Sex championships, martial law in Putin’s Russia, and fakes

Deep-fakes, fakes, Astroturfing, AI-generated…these are the buzz words of the tech savvy or those wanna-be tech-savvies. They are littered with dangers and when you are found out, you are in some seriously embarrassing positions. 

During the last few days, we first got the fake on Sweden registering sex as a sport. There was flurry of news stories picking up on this. It turned out to be a fake. 

Few days later, media in Russia picked up another fake, in which Russian President VladmirPutin was declaring martial law, seemingly as a reaction to an offensive by Ukraine. That too turned out to be a fake. A fake that was much more sophisticated in construction and deployment. 

Identifying fakes quickly is a key skill anyone who even has any inclination of working on information dissemination should acquire. Otherwise not only will you be an outlet spewing fakes and lies, but you can be a handle for much more sinister motives

“Russians, brothers and sisters, today at 4.00 am, Ukrainian troops armed by the NATO bloc with the consent and support of Washington invaded the territories of the Kursk, Belgorod and Bryansk regions,” the video began. 
It was not picked up, but rather Russian TV stations had been hacked to air it. The hack, according to analysts could be part of a larger plan to coincide with the long-awaited Ukrainian offensive.The two fakes side-by-side, are waypoints to the dangers posed by manufactured fiction with all the draperies of fact. 

Identifying fakes quickly is a key skill anyone who even has any inclination of working on information dissemination should acquire. Otherwise not only will you be an outlet spewing fakes and lies, but you can be a handle for much more sinister motives. 

The Sri Lankan media landscape has changed where the number of professional and trained journalists is very low. We tend to equate experience on the job to expertise here. It is experience but not expertise. Experience creates wide networks and efficiency in the job. It not necessarily translates into professionalism. 
The inability or the unwillingness to decouple experience and expertise in turn has led to those with very little expertise usurping top jobs. 

Identifying fakes quickly is a key skill anyone who even has any inclination of working on information dissemination should acquire. Otherwise not only will you be an outlet spewing fakes and lies, but you can be a handle for much more sinister motives

Virality is the same. Just because a post is popular or an account has multiple thousand followers, it does not mean the content or the content creators are professional. They may be really good at creating click-bait which in turn generates the cash. Again, that does not mean that the content is authentic and is for public good. 
It is even more unfortunate when those who parade as journalism professionals and academics support the content and content creators as the gold standard. 

The deeply divisive Sri Lankan media landscape is rife ground for deep fakes and artificial manipulation. We already have researched confirmation on how at least one young Sri Lankan politico sought the help of content farms to boost his profile. 

I suspect that this is not the only case and not only the politicians are doing this.When your aim is going viral, your guard falls. Precisely why some media outlets fell for the sex championship story. Precisely why we need to train journalists on how to navigate the minefield that is the digital and online landscape. 

Virality is the same. Just because a post is popular or an account has multiple thousand followers, it does not mean the content or the content creators are professional. They may be really good at creating click-bait which in turn generates the cash. Again, that does not mean that the content is authentic and is for public good

You are left even more vulnerable if you lack the required skills and expertise.
Precisely why we need to divert resources to train the Sri Lanka media community to gain the skills to become digital native journalists. Digital native journalism is not someone holding a mobile phone and wearing a T-shirt with ‘mojo’ on it. It is not by a long shot. 

The Aragalaya showed us the depths of the public mistrust with the media. Even the media mistrusts the media. So much so, that many journalists who reported the protests, identified with the protesters and their objectives. 
I am not for a minute saying that journalism should supersede the freedom we enjoy as citizens. But if that is the case, park your journalism and be the citizen you want to be. Don’t blur 
the lines. 

The time may not be far when Sri Lanka too will be at the receiving end of a deep-fake operation akin to that of the Putin-Martial Law video. The likelihood is that this will be done by some party who wants to gain the political upper hand. 

If that comes to happen, are the mojo trained ‘journos’ capable of detecting the fake? Detecting it before putting it out to the public? 
Let’s spice it up a bit, will they resist, if the fake is full of click-bait and cascading hits? 

The writer is a journalism researcher and a PhD candidate. He can be contacted on amantha.perera@
cqumail.com