Exploiting 'Seeing Is Believing'

Exploiting “Seeing Is Believing”

Doubt is a healthy thing in a democracy. If someone sends you a video of supposed election misdeeds, it’s more than reasonable to find that compelling and potentially important. But how do you make sure that in looking at videos and other evidence you are asking valid questions about an event of social importance—and not taking the off-ramp into a fictional world full of false experiences meant to manipulate and enrage you?

As always, the first thing to ask yourself when you encounter such content is not whether it is true or false. That comes later. The first question is always, Do I understand what I’m looking at here? And to answer that, you need to think about our three contexts. For the video shared, the most obvious factor is the context of you. What riles you up? Do you know what normal election procedures look like? Can you tell the difference between a valid ballot container and a suspicious one? Have you become a sudden “elections expert” two minutes after watching something on YouTube?

You might note, as well, that you have very little information on the other contexts. On the context of the source, it might seem initially obvious: the video is from a surveillance camera. But the video is also two minutes long, not twelve hours: Who decided where it would start and stop? Who supplied the description of these as “suitcases of ballots,” and who is saying these were counted without oversight? An objective source? An expert? Or someone with an ax to grind? And while we’re at it, what’s the context of the claim? What happened before? What happened after? What would an actual expert in elections say is happening in this video?

When we say to stop and take note of these issues, we’re not talking about doing a research project. If you take as long to do it as it took to read the preceding paragraph, you’re doing it wrong. This isn’t a checklist or a worksheet. Your inability to answer even one of these questions is enough to realize that you don’t actually know what you’re looking at. And that’s enough to push you to a decision—either wait until a better-sourced and contextualized video comes out, or, if you still find this compelling, do the moves.

With video, we almost always go straight to the F in SIFT, find other coverage, particularly if the video is an excerpt from something longer. Most deceptive video is “real” in the sense that it usually depicts something that happened somewhere: it’s the context—the who, what, when, where, and why—that gets hacked by bad actors. So, getting the bigger story by finding out what others have said about the video is a good first stop.

While we can’t precisely simulate what it would have been like to search for this video when it first emerged in the context of a Georgia legislative session, the search we are about to describe is a half-decent guess. When new evidence emerges, it’s often the case that context isn’t immediately available. Even in the best of circumstances, it takes a few hours for reporters, researchers, and other experts to reconstruct the full context of a decontextualized video. A search made at that stage might return irrelevant results or send you back to the same video, without supplying independent context. The illustrative search screenshot is not included here.10

This lack of results is in itself a signal—a signal communicating one of the hardest messages for human beings to comprehend: maybe you should wait. Before you get incensed, before you rage-share it, before you decide to experience it as fact, maybe wait and get the context. Trust us: if there are legs to a video, people are frantically looking into it. You won’t have to wait long.

Keep in mind that after a video like this goes viral, the first “reporting” on the scene is not likely to be reporting at all but various rage merchants wrapping a blog post around a YouTube video with various levels of exclamation points and caps-lock use. Reliable reporters need time to work. Rage merchants do not. When it comes to breaking events, the greatest information literacy superpower is often just learning to wait before allowing yourself to form deep beliefs about the event. Remember that both the con artist and the propagandist feed on the impatient, because time to investigate and reflect does not favor liars.

In the Georgia case, subsequent reporting supplied the backstory needed to understand the video. They weren’t suitcases. They weren’t hidden ballots. They weren’t unsupervised. Workers were not forced to go home. If you think back to all the things that made this video compelling or enraging—none of those things are true.