By Georgia Wells, Shelby Holliday and Deepa Seetharaman 

A decade ago, at a pro-immigration march on the steps of the Capitol building in Little Rock, Ark., community organizer Randi Romo saw a woman carrying a sign that read "no human being is illegal." She took a photograph and sent it to an activist group, which uploaded it to photo-sharing site Flickr.

Last August, the same image -- digitally altered so the sign read "give me more free shit" -- appeared on a Facebook page, Secured Borders, which called for the deportation of undocumented immigrants. The image was liked or shared hundreds of times, according to cached versions of the page.

This use of doctored images was a crucial and deceptively simple technique used by Russian propagandists to spread fabricated information during the 2016 election, one that exposes a loophole in tech company defenses. Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google have traps to detect misinformation, but struggle -- then and now -- to identify falsehoods posted directly on their platforms, in particular through pictures.

Facebook disclosed last fall that Secured Borders was one of 290 Facebook and Instagram pages created and run by Russia-backed accounts that sought to amplify divisive social issues, including immigration. Last week's indictment secured by special counsel Robert Mueller cited the Secured Borders page as an example of how Russians invented fake personas in an effort to "sow discord in the U.S. political system."

The campaigns conducted by some of those accounts, according to a Wall Street Journal review, often relied on images that were doctored or taken out of context.

Algorithms designed by big technology companies are years away from being able to accurately interpret the content of many images and detect indications they might have been distorted or taken out of context. Facebook says detecting even text-based content that violates its standards is still too difficult to automate exclusively. Facebook and Google continue to rely heavily on users to flag posts that contain potentially false information. On Wednesday, for example, YouTube said it mistakenly promoted a conspiratorial video falsely accusing a teenage witness in last week's Florida school shooting of being an actor.

Automated systems are generally set up to suppress links to fake news articles. Falsehoods posted directly, such as within status updates, images and videos, escape scrutiny. Moreover, the companies are generally reluctant to remove content that is said to be false, to avoid refereeing the truth.

Users, meanwhile, are less likely to doubt the legitimacy of images, making distorted pictures unusually effective weapons in misinformation campaigns, says Claire Wardle, a research fellow and expert in social media and user-generated content at Harvard University's Shorenstein Center.

Last week's indictment described how a Russian organization called the Internet Research Agency issued guidance to its workers on ratios of texts in their posts and how to use graphics and videos.

"I created all these pictures and posts, and the Americans believed that it was written by their people," one of the co-conspirators emailed a relative in September, the indictment said.

The Russian entities often added small icons known as watermarks to the corners of their doctored photos, which branded their impostor social-media accounts and lent an air of authenticity to the pictures.

"In a world where we're kind of scrolling through on these small smartphone screens, images are incredibly powerful because we're a lot less likely to stop and think, 'does this look real?' " said Dr. Wardle, who also leads First Draft News, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting digital misinformation that works with tech companies on some projects.

Facebook is working to fix its platform and prevent further manipulation ahead of the U.S. midterm elections in November -- an effort Facebook leaders have described as urgent. The company, along with Google and Twitter Inc., has been under fire from lawmakers and other critics over the handling of Russian meddling in the presidential election.

"It's abhorrent to us that a nation-state used our platform to wage a cyberwar intended to divide society," Facebook executive Samidh Chakrabarti said in a blog last month, adding that the company should have done more to prevent it. "Now we're making up for lost time."

Facebook is refocusing to become what it calls "video first" and expects video will dominate its news feed within a few years, which suggests its challenges will only intensify.

The company plans to expand its program for tracking and suppressing links to fake news articles to include doctored images and videos, according to a Facebook spokesman. Facebook discussed the idea earlier this month with fact-checking groups it has been working with to check news stories, along with plans to build more tools to help identify when photos are taken out of context.

People tend to share images and videos more than plain text. During three months around the U.S. presidential election, tweets that included photos were nearly twice as likely to be retweeted than text-only tweets, according to researchers at Syracuse University studying how information spreads on social networks.

On April 17, University of Southern California student Tiana Lowe spotted a racist sign hanging in front of a student housing complex near campus. On a piece of cardboard, the words "No Black People Allowed" appeared next to a drawing of the Confederate flag and the hashtag #MAGA, for President Donald Trump's campaign slogan.

Ms. Lowe snapped a photo on her iPhone. In a story that day for the campus news site, the Tab, she questioned whether the incident was a hoax, writing that the sign had been hung by a black neighbor who was unaffiliated with the university following a dispute with the housing complex's residents. USC's Department of Public Safety said the man admitted to placing the sign. (The Tab, an independent campus news site, is partially funded by News Corp, owner of the Journal.)

The following day, a modified version of the photo appeared on a popular Facebook page, Blacktivist. The image was cropped, altered and watermarked with a Blacktivist logo, and the #MAGA hashtag was digitally removed. Information that could be used to identify the house, such as the phone number for the property's leasing office, was cut out.

The Blacktivist page, which last Friday's indictment said was controlled by Russian entities, cast the significance of the photo in a different light. The caption next to the photo made no mention of a hoax, instead portraying it as a racist act.

"Why racial intolerance still has a place in our country?" it read. "Racially-charged incidents continue to happen and it must receive national attention." The Blacktivist page had more than 300,000 followers at the time.

"It had clearly been framed and repackaged as an act of white supremacy rather than a hate-crime hoax," says Ms. Lowe. She became aware of the reuse of her photo two days later when a conservative college news site, the College Fix, picked up the Blacktivist post.

Ms. Lowe says she wrote a comment on the Blacktivist post saying the information had been taken out of context, and she tweeted a screenshot of the post calling Blacktivist "fake news." She didn't file a formal complaint with Facebook and didn't learn more about Blacktivist until Facebook revealed months later it was linked to Russia.

Tech companies can detect exact or near-exact copies of images, videos and audio for copyright enforcement. Spotting doctored photos or videos is a different challenge because tracking those changes requires keeping tabs on the original image, which isn't always available, says Krishna Bharat, who helped create Google News and now advises and invests in startups. Running a comparative analysis can be expensive, and there are legitimate reasons someone might crop, touch-up or add a new element to a photo.

Around the time last summer that Secured Borders posted Ms. Romo's photo of the mother supposedly asking for handouts, the group also posted a meme that suggested millions of illegal immigrants may have voted in the 2008 election. It depicted a man who appeared to be Hispanic holding a document, implying that he had illegally voted.

The image originated in a newscast two years earlier on Los Angeles television station KTLA about a state program to provide driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. A KTLA executive said he wasn't aware that Secured Borders had used an image from the newscast.

When misleading content is flagged, tech companies wrestle with what to do next. Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet's YouTube say they only remove content that violates their standards, such as promoting hate speech, spam or distributing child pornography. Misinformation by itself doesn't count. Doctored images or status updates containing falsehoods can remain up if the posts don't otherwise violate their policies.

When Facebook in September removed the 290 Russia-backed pages on Facebook and its photo-sharing platform Instagram, it said it did so because the accounts misrepresented their identity, not because of the veracity of the content.

One of the misleading photos disseminated by a Russia-backed page has remained on social media because Instagram said it doesn't violate its content policies.

BlackMattersUS, a Russia-backed page purporting to promote the black community, posted a misleading photo that was reshared on Instagram as recently as January 2017. It shows a young black boy with overlaid text saying that, because of homicide, suicide and incarceration, "the black male is effectively dying at the rate of an endangered species." The BlackMattersUS account was taken down by Instagram, but because the image was shared by other legitimate accounts, the post remained online as of mid-February.

The meme -- a photo with text on top, which is tougher for software to read than plain text -- includes no citation of research or statistics. The image's claim that black adult females greatly outnumber black adult males is false, census data indicate.

The authentic photo was part of a 2013 series on "dambe" boxers in northern Nigeria by Nigerian photographer August Udoh, who wasn't aware his work was used by BlackMattersUS. "The thing is, the message itself is not even related to the image," says Mr. Udoh. "How do you put those two together and make propaganda out of it? It's crazy."

Ms. Romo, the photographer of the pro-immigration march, says she discovered her photo had been manipulated by the Russia-backed account only when she got a call from a Journal reporter. "We are living in the greatest era of information access," she says. "People will watch cat videos endlessly, but they won't take a minute to ascertain whether what they are being told is true or not."

Write to Georgia Wells at Georgia.Wells@wsj.com and Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com

 

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 22, 2018 10:59 ET (15:59 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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