MANIPULATION
“Misinformation can be sticky, spreading and replicating like a virus.”
—Sander van der Linden, social psychologist at the University of Cambridge.
Van der Linden's team of researchers assembled more than two-thousand United States residentsacross the country from various ages, genders, political leanings and education levels. The researchers presented the group with a number of scientifically sound climate change facts in the form of statements, such as “Ninety-seven percent of climate scientistshave concluded that human-caused global warming is happening.” They also presented the group with misinformation taken from an Oregon petition that was known to be fraudulent, which stated that “thirty-one thousand American scientists state that there is no evidence that human-released CO2 causes climate change.” Those who were shown only the accurate information, described the scientific consensus as “very high.”Those who were shown only the false information reported the scientific consensus as “very low.”However, when shown both statements one after the other, the statements effectively cancelled each other out, putting people back to a state of indecision. “It’s uncomfortable to think that misinformation is so potent in our society,” said van der Linden.
The importance of the study, is that Conflicting
messages can be and are used to confuse us.
Criminal psychologist Julia Shaw, the author of The Memory Illusion, specializes in the science of memory. “I am a memory hacker,” Shaw says. “I use the science of memory to make you think you did things that never happened.”
It turns out; planting a false memory is very easy to do. Shaw says, “A memory is a network of brain cells.” That network is constantly being updated. This allows humans to learn new things and to problem-solve. But as a result, Shaw says, this network “can be manipulated.” Shaw also states;
“In the lab, I convince people through
memory hacking that they committed
crimes that never happened, I do it to show
that the interrogation process can really
distort memories in consistent ways.”
Each time you tell a story, you change the memory. You may change the details based on things you heard from someone else, creating new and possibly inaccurate or misleading connections,” she says. To implant a false memory, “you try to get someone to confuse their imagination with their memory…Get them to repeatedly picture it happening,” she says.
She’ll layer in detail—the person’s age, hometown, the name of their childhood best friend—and get them to repeatedly imagine the crime happening over and over again, even if they never did it.Over time, “it gets harder to decipher imagination versus a memory coming back,” Shaw says. “By the end, it’s easy to think this actually happened.”
Medical procedures may also be used to manipulate memories. Optogenetics (a technique that uses light to switch various parts of the brain on and off) has been used to erase the fear associated with bad memories in rats. Optogenetic techniques currently require cutting a hole in the rats’ skulls. This has not yet been done in humans but these techniques suggest what could be possible.
Video now presents additional and alarmingly significant opportunities for manipulation.
Researchers at the University of Washington have developed an algorithm to take audio of someone talking and turn that into a realistic lip-synced video of someone speaking those words.
In creating a video of President Obama, the researchers used what’s called a recurrent neural network to synthesize the mouth shape from the audio. (This kind of system, modeled on the human brain, can take in huge piles of data and find patterns. Recurrent neural networks are also used for facial recognition and speech recognition.)They then trained their system using millions of existing video frames of Obama speaking. Finally, they smoothed out the footage using compositing techniques applied to actual footage of Obama’s head and torso.
“We’re not learning just how to give a talking face to Siri; we’re learning how to capture human personas,” says Supasorn Suwajanakorn, a co-author of the research.Samsung, Google, Facebook and Intel all contributed funding for this research.
Imagine a lip-synced video of a world leader saying something that is entirely false, something that could create panic, riots or even war.
All of this highlights the potential threats posed by the malleability of the human brain—our double-edged swords.To guard against these potential threats we must first be aware of them. We must then remain ever alert and vigilant against the potential for manipulation.
