Killer Visual Strategies

CHAPTER 11RULE 8: COMMIT TO THE TRUTH AND PROVE IT

Figure 11.1

Source: Edelman, “2019 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report.”

During the 2016 United States presidential election, the term “fake news” entered the vernacular of citizens throughout the country and around the world. While fake news has been around for centuries, it exploded during the election and was weaponized in ways that few could have predicted. The combination of a divisive campaign, ease of access to news via social-media channels, and our voracious demand for visual content created the perfect storm for fake news to flourish.

Prior to 2016, many of us were not prone to question the veracity of the visual content we were exposed to. If a photo appeared with a quote next to it, people rarely debated whether the quotation could really be attributed to the person in the photo. Instead, the visual was trusted and shared widely.

In the same vein, many believed that they would be able to spot a fake video from a mile away. Live-action video was considered a true representation of reality—unless labeled otherwise, of course. The concept of a “deepfake”—wherein artificial neural networks are used to map the likeness of another person onto an existing video, co-opting the words and facial movements from that original video in the process—was unknown to most.

But during the 2016 election, Cambridge Analytica, ...