Media literacy
MANIPULATIONS IN THE MEDIA
Each of us is an active user of various information resources, but not everyone understands we are manipulated with the help of the media. In our article you can learn how to avoid becoming a victim of the negative impact of advertisement.
Manipulation in the media is a tool which journalists use to make us think in the way they want. Unfortunately, we often can’t notice that.
HOW DOES ADVERTISING AFFECT SOCIETY?
Advertising encourages us to make impulsive purchases.
Advertisements usually show products at a discount, which is not always good for the buyer. However, not everyone notices this manipulation by advertisers. This technique makes us think that we need a product right here and right now. "Unique offer!", "Don't miss this opportunity!", "Only today!" - all these phrases are examples of hidden manipulation.
"I'm not beautiful / smart / well-off enough ..." - a consequence of excessive viewing of advertising.
Advertising always broadcasts a certain ideal, which, most often, does not correspond to reality. The viewer unconsciously begins to compare himself with a non-existent model, because of this complexes and self-doubt are born.
Buy happiness!
Now that you are sure that you do not meet certain social standards, it is very easy to encourage you to buy expensive clothes, jewelry and other things that, under the influence of advertising, seem to be the only way to increase your social status.
Advertising offers you happiness in exchange for acquiring goods.
5 QUESTIONS you have to ask yourself about an advert:
How to spot fake images and videos?
FAKE VIDEOs
Fake videos are everywhere. Some of them are harmless (for instance, in films or series), others could lead to bad consequences (news or political TV shows).
Last year a video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi circulated online that was slowed down, making it look like she was intoxicated.
Edward J. Delp, a professor at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, has been studying media and video fakes for 25 years. There are some tips from him:
ADVICE
Pay attention to natural details
“Look at the person in the video and see if their eyes are blinking in a weird way,” Delp says.
“Also, by watching their head motion, you may be able to see if there is unnatural movement.”
Metadata verification
You should check if audio mathes the speaker’s lips’ movements, whether facial expressions and human movement on video are realistic?
Check the metadata
It's a more professional method, which Delp’s team uses.
Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself.
“This embedded data tells you more about the image or video, like when it was taken and what format it’s in,” Delp says.
FAKE-AUDIO
If you use a voice assistant in your life, then most likely you may have already encountered audio manipulations. It is very difficult to recognize such harmful psychological effects because of piece intelligence.
Vijay Balasubramaniyan is the CEO and co-founder of Pindrop, a company that creates security solutions to protect against the damage fake audio can do.
He believes that audio manipulation can ruin the lives of people and large companies. “Every year, we see about $470 million in fraud losses, including from wire transfer and phone scams. It’s a massive scale,” he says.The audio can be greatly altered, making it very difficult to tell the difference.
ADVICE
Try to find the line between background noise and speech.
“If you don’t have enough audio to fill out all of the different sounds of someone’s voice, the result tends to sound more whiny than humans are,” Balasubramaniyan says.
Pay attention to time
“When you record audio, every second of audio you analyze gives between 8,000 to 40,000 data points for your voice,” Balasubramaniyan says. “ They try to make the created voice look similar, but it does not always correspond to the intonation of a real person
Pay attention to deaf consonants
Some consonant sounds, like "t"," f" and "s", can be made without using your voice. “When you say these fricatives, that kind of sound is very similar to noise,” Balasubramaniyan says. “They have different characteristics than other parts of vocal speech, and machines aren’t very good at replicating them.”
